The SAT has anti-semitic roots according to Joseph Soares, a Sociology professor at Wake Forest. It was not created for the purpose of measuring student success. It was created for the purpose of "proving" Nordic supremacy over Jews.
With the latest attempt to rebrand its century-old product, the College Board is acting like a corporate entity driven by market-share calculations. The SAT was rolled out in 1926 by Princeton and Yale universities as an IQ test that was believed — falsely — to demonstrate the superiority of Nordic genetic stock in order to discriminate against Jews.
It was thought up before the Nazis came to power in Germany and assigned numbers to Jews and made them wear badges for the purposes of shaming them. They may be gone, but the practice of assigning a value to human life moves on. While today's tests are not overtly racist, most of them display cultural bias that reflects the prejudices of the people devising the test. They are more likely to measure the income level or the race of the taker than they are of the student's ability to succeed in school.
Soares says that the SAT does not predict college success, but that it simply reflects the income level of the test-taker.
Test scores unnecessarily add social discrimination to a college’s admissions machinery. The most reliable academic metric available, high school grades, does not correlate with family income or parents’ education, but test scores do. There is a strong linear relationship between family income and test scores: The higher the family income, the higher the youth’s test score. If a college wants an applicant pool and an incoming freshman class to come overwhelmingly from families with high incomes, all it has to do is publicize a high test score requirement for its students.
Students from low-income families, without the privilege of extensive test prep, simply do not apply with their low test scores. Test-score-selective colleges pick their students from a socially exclusive applicant pool of those with high test scores. It is not an accident that nearly 79 percent of the students at the most selective colleges and universities come from the top economic quartile of America’s families. These institutions claim to select for brains, not bank accounts, but the best brains can be identified by high school records, not by test scores. Test scores disguise social privilege by passing it off as academic advantage; high school grades do not.
The reason is simply -- upper income families can afford to spend thousands of dollars getting their kids to pass the SAT so that they can get into the college that they want. Lower income families, well, are out of luck. And then they wonder why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer every year.
As it turns out, when Wake Forest did away with test scores as an admission tool, grades actually went up.
Since Wake Forest University, where I am a professor, went test-optional in 2009, our freshman classes have come in with higher high school grades and received higher first-year grades from their professors than previous classes did. Our students are academically stronger for being selected by their high school transcripts and not their test scores. They come from more racially and economically diverse backgrounds than before.
And a few schools have done away with grades almost entirely. One school I went to, Evergreen State (WA), does not grade students. Instead, they have self-evaluation systems. They have written self-evaluations by a teacher and then the student evaluates their own work. Courses are all interdisciplinary, which means that you can have philosophy, math, writing, and science all in the same course depending on the field of study. What they found was that employers are much more likely to get a good look at a student if they know something about the actual person as opposed to a mere set of grades. Obviously, if you don't do the work, you don't get the credit.