The SAT again, the monster that would not die

Ah, here we go again. One step forward, two steps back. Finally, because of the pandemic, many colleges dropped or made optional the SAT — the college admission test that has reinforced privilege and inequity for decades and makes millions of dollars for the College Board corporation. The test has been problematic in so many ways — it reinforces hierarchies through cultural and racial bias, it disadvantages strong students who are bad test-takers, and it narrows the curriculum in high school as the demands of test prep push aside other interests and inquiries.

Now the pushback is starting and count on the New York Times to take the lead in the reactionary narrative in the article entitled “The misguided war on the SAT” by David Leonhardt. It’s so complicated, some colleges complain, to figure out who to admit if we are only using high school grades and recommendations and essays. SAT test scores, they claim, are important in predicting college grades, graduation, and lucrative careers.

As I’ve argued before, this line of thinking actually forces admissions decisions that have no legitimate basis. Say your college has 2,000 spots for freshmen. And say 6,000 of the applicants are well qualified and will do fine at your college. How to decide which 2,000 students to admit? Does it really make a difference if student A got a 1450 on the SAT and Student B got a 1425? There are so many more important things to consider, but I’ll get to that later.

First, let’s debunk this claim of predicting college grades, college GPA. As Jake Vigdor of the University of Washington points out, the data claims that the Times makes are misleading, since “over 80% of the variation in college grades exists among students with similar test scores. Does that sound like strong prediction to you?”

Really, the best push back to the Times article comes from Jon Boeckenstedt, Vice Provost of Enrollment Management at Oregon State University. His blog thoroughly destroys the “SAT is needed” myths.

But I want to look at another conundrum of the college admissions game, the constant drumbeat of the need to “predict college success.” The “predicting success” game can be tricky. I could conduct a study that shows that people who play golf at country clubs in high school have a better chance of getting a lucrative job. Now, that is not causation, it is correlation. Wealthy families are likely to set up their kids in well-paying jobs.

So now let’s imagine that the College Board could devise a test that clearly “predicted” how kids would do in college. Certainly that test could be extremely racist and classist, correlating results with how white and wealthy a student was. But since many college professors teach in a white discourse mode and privilege white cultural ways of knowing, voilá, that student who did well on the test does well in school. The white privilege of college practices is what defines institutional racism.

What I’m suggesting is that changes need to be made up and down the line. The bottom line is that BIPOC youth should be admitted because the labor of their families helped build these institutions and because their communities need doctors, lawyers, researchers, teachers and the rest. Colleges should be opening doors to a diverse range of students — not just the “talented tenth” who can perform whiteness. Recognize that the many BIPOC students who are ready to do college-level work may also challenge the institution to change. Colleges should not consider their mission to be bestowing blessings on the “lesser” ones, gracing them with training in elite (and white) learning. Perhaps the content of the curriculum, the pedagogy, the school culture must change if we are really going to embrace diversity.

Colleges and universities are caught up in contrasting visions, two paths, as regards their missions. Most of them certainly offer exciting and expansive opportunities for gaining knowledge — skills and perspectives. But too often they act as remote islands of elite, and often irrelevant, knowledge — monuments to settled, abstract facts. To serve all students, colleges should be sites of contention, engagement, and the development of new directions. They should be community resources that respond to the needs and dreams of the community. The squabbles over admissions simply expose these two visions of higher education.