New data compiled by economists at Harvard-based Opportunity Insights further confirm what anyone familiar with elite universities’ admissions process has long known: The SAT is a more reliable predictor of wealth than intellectual aptitude. The richer a test-taker’s family is, the better they perform: Those whose families are in the top 1% of earners are 13 times more likely to score above 1300 than the poorest students. And the “Ivy-Plus” colleges that graduate a disproportionate amount of our nation’s future leaders and high earners are twice as likely to admit wealthy students than their less affluent peers, even if they have comparable standardized test scores. Elite college admissions, it is clearer than ever, is no meritocracy.
Those whose families are in the top 1% of earners are 13 times more likely to score above 1300 than the poorest students.
These findings will likely embolden anti-testing activists and educators who seek to abolish college entrance exams and other high-stakes assessments, on the grounds that they entrench educational inequity. But the study also finds that legacy connections, athletic recruitment and “non-academic ratings” give wealthier applicants a significant advantage — again, even over less well-off applicants with the same standardized test scores. Testing, then, is not itself the issue, but a symptom of a much thornier problem.
Eliminating the SAT, other screening tests, and even advanced placement academic programs, is an understandable response to the glaring disparities those tests and programs make obvious. At New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, where seats are assigned based only on scores on the SHSAT (which is taken in 8th grade), only seven of 762 offers went to Black students this year, even though nearly one quarter of the public school system is Black. That’s a statistic that testing opponents highlight as proof of the inherently discriminatory nature of such exams.
Anti-testing activism has spread across the country and has been especially effective in the past few years, when Covid created practical concerns that converged with this philosophical project. In New York, the Regents exams, once required for graduation, were suspended and then made optional in 2021. The same year, the University of California system dropped even the SAT/ACT testing option in response to a lawsuit that labeled the SAT and ACT “racist metrics.” That change prompted applications from Black and Latino students to rise by “an impressive margin,” the university said. Using similar arguments, many colleges have become “test-optional,” while some school districts have scaled back advanced courses in which white students were overrepresented.
Abolishing these tests and some advanced placement programs will certainly make some disparities less glaringly obvious, but it will not solve the underlying problem. In fact, eliminating these instruments and learning environments is more likely to exacerbate already dire educational disparities by making them less apparent.
History is instructive: When the SAT was developed nearly a century ago, enthusiasm for eugenics ran high in intellectual circles, and such “objective” testing was considered a crucial tool in rationally ordering society, in this case by intellectual aptitude. This fantasy of perfect objectivity is what animated the SAT’s adoption first by Harvard and then more broadly in the 1930s: Admission to an elite school had meant mastering a curriculum only available at exclusive prep schools or having access to a WASP social network, but Harvard President James Bryant Conant believed this test, which measured intellectual aptitude rather than familiarity with Greek or Latin or the social norms of Newport or Southampton, could be an important tool of the “American radical… lusty in wielding the axe against the root of inherited privilege.” Standardized testing, he thought, could help bring about a “classless society.”
It is this promise of the SAT to counterbalance an opaque and unfair system — to democratize college admissions — what explains why marginalized groups often advocated for such exams. Jews in the 1930s, for example, knew a high SAT score would make it harder for universities to exclude them based on their accent, public school education or failure to meet a deliberately nebulous criterion of “character.” Today, Asian American advocates make similar arguments, and some have pointed out that the push to de-emphasize testing and academics just happens to come as their performance threatens the status of white students.
Eliminating standardized assessments reopens the door to all sorts of ambiguous “qualitative” measures that serve to disadvantage kids.
Ironically, eliminating standardized assessments reopens the door to all sorts of ambiguous “qualitative” measures that serve to disadvantage kids in the same, difficult-to-detect ways that the old boys’ network of yore did. Such a shift will only ensure that students who have legacy connections, extracurricular opportunities and in-depth recommendations written by guidance counselors at well-resourced schools have an even greater advantage.
Not exactly progress.
Eliminating these tests, or advocating for a kind of undifferentiated educational experience, will not solve these insidious issues but mask them or make them worse. Imperfect as these tests are as objective instruments, they are crucial tools to illuminate what kids know and don’t, and to identify what support they need. Furthermore, casting students into environments for which they’re unprepared — academically and otherwise — sets them up to fail. Getting rid of advanced classes disadvantages students learning at an accelerated level — although those who can afford it will get enrichment elsewhere — and presumes a one-size-fits-all approach to learning. The evidence suggests, though, that individualized educational attention is especially necessary for students with learning differences.
The answer to solving educational inequality is, unsurprisingly, much more complicated than simply abolishing tests and metrics: It demands investing in early childhood programs, nutrition, health care and housing. It means essentially eradicating the poverty that is concentrated among lower-income people of color and tightly correlated to gaps in educational attainment.
The need for such reforms is obvious and urgent but such policies are unlikely to gain traction in the U.S. So, instead, reformers seize on the singular, more tangible, target that is testing. But it’s a mere symptom of this larger problem, and could perhaps play a role in its resolution.
The answer to solving educational inequality is much more complicated than abolishing tests and metrics.
The issue is not tests, SAT or otherwise, but the outsized power we have ascribed to them as “objective.” We’d do better to acknowledge that these tests are imperfect measures of intelligence and aptitude, but can be useful assessment tools to identify what students and teachers need.
If we don’t assess kids often, then we don’t know how they are doing, which makes it far harder to argue for resources. Yes, we must stop equating testing and curricular differentiation with high-stakes, door-closing decisions, and instead embrace these tools to expand access for students at all academic levels to the educational resources they need to thrive — in college, and in the many years before and after.