Should SATs Matter?

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Over the past few years, however, the test's defenders have started to lose ground. About 280 of the nation's 2,083 four-year colleges and universities make the SAT optional for some or all applicants; a handful of prestigious colleges, including Franklin and Marshall and Mount Holyoke, have joined their ranks since the early '90s and say they aren't admitting idiots as a result. Hamilton College is considering making the SAT optional. Countless other schools have de-emphasized the SAT in more subtle ways--continuing to ask for scores but weighing other factors more heavily.

Granted many of the SAT-optional schools sit on utopian campuses in liberal New England villages. But it's getting hard to find an admissions officer anywhere who says an SAT score alone tells you anything important. Deans at prestigious, traditional bastions such as Vanderbilt support the SAT, but some of the test's assumed proponents aren't guarding it against the barbarians. Even conservatives at the Weekly Standard have written about how the SAT has "shaped--and misshaped--modern American life."

But if we drop the SAT, by what means should we allot membership in the nation's elite? Of course, plenty of people make movies and play in the major leagues and run companies and write for magazines without high SATs. But good scores sure don't hurt. Besides, don't they measure something valuable--something beyond the diligence it takes to memorize the details of the Franco-Prussian War for a history exam? Much of the debate over the SAT boils down to this: Assuming we can measure innate intelligence, do we want a society that rewards genes? Are we afraid of what kind of society that might be? Or should we instead reward only the achievements of a life--what we do with our gifts, not what we start with?

To answer these questions, you have to understand both how the SAT rose to prominence and how it has fallen into turmoil. Appropriately, the story begins in California. In the two decades after World War II, the College Board struggled to build the reputation of the SAT, which was first used experimentally in 1926. The board desperately wanted the University of California, then the biggest university in the nation, to fully adopt the test. In 1962, as Nicholas Lemann says in his brilliant history, The Big Test, an SAT honcho wrote to his colleagues of the dire consequences if U.C. decided to end its then limited use of the test: "If they drop the SAT, we will lose a great deal more than the revenue; we will suffer a damaging blow to our prestige."

In 1967, its confidence in the value of high school transcripts eroded, U.C. finally started requiring SAT scores from all applicants. From that point, the test grew into a national juggernaut. Within a matter of years, as college attendance skyrocketed, many admissions offices were relying heavily on the standardized SAT scores to help winnow piles of applications.