Just Leave the SAT Dead and Buried

Resurrecting the SAT was an Over-hyped Surrender to Dystopia

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

Many pundits were downright psyched about some elite US universities reinstating the SAT as an admissions requirement a few months ago. If anything could inspire a bit of rare cross-political victory-lapping from both the normies and the commentariat, it would be this undying avatar of our unhappy, world-eating meritocracy. While few things enjoy such near-uniformly unquestionable status, it’s still a little jarring to see people like

Matthew Yglesias

heralding the SAT when he’s openly decried meritocracy in the past.

I still sympathize a bit with these pro-SAT instincts, and several years ago, I would have readily clapped along, but I now find it tricky to square the SAT fanfare and status quo-ism with the tire fire surrounding higher ed. Does this squeamishness towards eschewing the keystone of a plainly necrotic portion of our culture make sense? Is the SAT really an estimable feature of modern American life, or is the instinct to champion it just a reaction to prominent subpar criticisms of the SAT that its defenders regard as unscientific offshoots of blank-slate-ism? If we sideline these incendiary (and potentially specious) complaints about whether the SAT is racist and undertake a clear-eyed review, the whole cult of the SAT looks pretty screwy.

For the SAT to fully justify its existing loyalties and the prevailing upbeat headspace about its reinstallation, several propositions likely need to be true:

1. Society ought to be organized meritocratically.

2. Some nearby version of the existing meritocratic regime, wherein career trajectories and social status are largely controlled by universities, is close to ideal or at least preferable to any feasible alternatives.

3. SAT-style testing is a crucial and irreplaceable tool for adjudicating merit within that regime.

4. The resulting benefits of including the SAT within the assessment battery for university applicants so obviously outweigh the possible demerits that a confidently positive attitude towards re-adopting the SAT is fitting.

But none of these claims are indubitable—in fact, some of them are pretty shaky. Maybe SAT enthusiasts merely support the meritocratic vibe associated with mandating a test like this, and they’d reject the array of statements above: they just prefer that the SAT features in college admissions as an incremental improvement ceteris paribus. But I’m doubtful these views can be so easily disconnected, and that’s a much more delicate and cautious endorsement of the SAT anyway. The pro-SAT crowd isn’t typically interlacing their flattery of the SAT with qualifications about how this marginal tweak is really a stopgap, and how the overarching system ultimately needs to be jettisoned, and so on.

Closer review of the beliefs hiding behind the pro-SAT chatter should at least temper any full-throated endorsements into measured ambivalence. To celebrate the SAT’s restoration unflinchingly, as a clear-cut victory for some noble cause, is nonsensical when the system built around it is so dysfunctional and unhappy, even if those liabilities aren’t specifically traceable to the SAT. An appropriately careful evaluation of meritocracy is too cumbersome to present here (I plan to devote several future essays to it), but its disadvantages are afflicting society even if it’s worth keeping. Unbridled meritocracy isn’t an unalloyed good, and few things better signify our pitiless and daunting meritocracy than the SAT. But it’s a longstanding sacred cow in the US.

Despite its popularity, some pushback has started accumulating. Daniel Markovits has criticized our high-octane meritocracy for posing an unenviable dilemma: either languish in a low-status pit of dead-end work and financial inferiority or sleep-deprive yourself through the joyless, full-throttle careerism of rarefied success. Michael Sandel critiques the meritocracy for systematically humiliating non-elites and forsaking the Common Good. But the eagerness to re-instate the SAT shows that skepticism of meritocracy hasn’t yet taken root, as does all the fervid, nonstop anti-DEI talk. It's all part of the under-scrutinized fantasy that meritocracy is a flawless lodestar for modern times.

Meritocracy by University

More people should be saddled with misgivings about meritocracy, but even those wanting to double down on it must confront the drawbacks of its current higher-ed-centric implementation. Subscribing to the assortment of beliefs above commits you to the notion that universities monopolizing the gateway to status is a workable system. But so long as the universities possess a stranglehold on the pathways to respectable salaried careers, they’re going to continue extracting a steep tax on ambition, squeezing people for resources, and making them fight tooth-and-nail over spots in their freshman class to maintain their aura of exclusivity.

The tendency to overload our reliance on universities and use them for both human capital and talent-sorting duties obscures their principal function and blurs their rumored educational value. Overall, depending on universities to classify the cerebral abilities of workforce newcomers has been a fountainhead of social infirmities. In Sandel’s book criticizing meritocracy, he writes this:

…Should colleges and universities take on the role of sorting people based on talent to determine who gets ahead in life?

There are at least two reasons to doubt that they should. The first concerns the invidious judgments such sorting implies for those who get sorted out, and the damaging consequences for a shared civic life. The second concerns the injury the meritocratic struggle inflicts on those who get sorted in and the risk that the sorting mission becomes so all-consuming that it diverts colleges and universities from their educational mission.¹

That’s all true, but it overlooks other key downsides to a university-based meritocracy, like how insanely wasteful it is, all the student loans it generates, how it’s perpetually erecting roadblocks in front of key checkpoints to adulthood, how job-seekers are constantly ramping up the credentialist warfare, and how women are resorting to chancy deferrals of their reproductive aims and cutting edge tech to accommodate the ever-lengthening prerequisites for career stability. Plus, it’s not like universities are a hotbed for freethinking these days. Altogether, it’s tempting to just scrap the entire obnoxious tradition.

Also, what is the great fear about purging the SAT from the admissions process—that it would sabotage the accuracy of the college-based sorting? Wouldn’t that encourage employers to shift their hiring focus, strategize about alternate methods for reliably assessing potential employees, and make them overall more open-minded about educational backgrounds? Wouldn’t this, in turn, disrupt higher ed’s sinecure as an overpriced-but-decisive-and-nonnegotiable marker of worker potential? Wouldn’t loosening employers’ death grip on college brand/degree fetishism permit students to choose between colleges based on factors outside of ranking and perceived reputation, creating more competition among colleges and lowering prices?

This all seems positive to me. Should we be so certain that spoiling the confidence in universities as infallible signalers of talent would be that regrettable? Degradation of this setup is worrisome if you think it’s irreplaceable or that employers would be irrecoverably out to sea without colleges doing their first round of interviews for them, unable to reliably gauge talent in a better or less costly way, but the current system seems like something we’ve inherited from historical contingency rather than something we’ve adopted for its inimitable greatness.

For the SAT to be good/important it’d have to be part of an overall beneficial undertaking, but the strategy of continually marshaling university resources towards sluggishly and expensively organizing our labor markets has been a misguided effort that went off the rails long ago. If that tradition isn’t worth salvaging—and I can’t see how would be—then positivity about the SAT is confused.

Is Correctly Matching Students and Schools Important?

To gauge the optimality of the SAT and the logic of its devotees, we must understand the goals of student-school matchmaking and if/why it’s so important for particular students to matriculate at particular universities. Do people think that universities sharply differ in their educational offerings and that elite students require field-leading professors or something? Would the economy be shortchanged if bright students got re-routed to middling schools?

I’m pretty doubtful about this. Firstly, the oversupply of PhDs in the US has made the caliber of academicians at the lowliest schools enough to provide intellectual headroom for brainy undergraduates; if anything, eggheaded standouts would more easily lock down quality mentoring at lesser institutions, since the publication-freaks at topflight schools sometimes ghost their own graduate students, let alone the plebeian undergrads. Fittingly matching students and schools is more crucial for grad school because of variation in research interests, but the limits on knowledge acquisition at mid-tier universities are, for undergrads, entirely derived from student curiosity and drive rather than opportunity.

More importantly, this theory is predicated—like so much else in the world—on an erroneous human capital perspective on higher ed. For students, the modern university’s primary function is to be a sorting machine that designates how talented and employable they are. Given that, the importance of pairing students and schools in a particular fashion is largely to facilitate that mechanism and clarify the outbound signal, and it should have little or nothing to do with the naive fantasy that economic payouts of college grads are attributable to infusions of human capital, let alone the theory that the successful uptake of those infusions is inflexibly contingent on attending exactly the correct school. In truth, superior learning is neither the key motivation for why students select elite schools nor the reason employers hire from them.

Indeed, endorsing the SAT is, to some degree, a tacit admission that the signaling theory of higher ed is correct. If universities were really preoccupied with educating their students, if innate variability of IQ was a hoax, and if educational institutions truly equipped students with a hefty and otherwise unobtainable upgrade to their cognitive powers, then colleges being so picky about the reasoning abilities of incoming freshman would be strange. If students’ pre-university brains can be dramatically remolded and augmented, then shouldn’t they be assessed upon graduation rather than before enrolling? Presumably, if this passel of wishful thinking were accurate, the university could just confer upon the low-scoring students whatever cognitive advantage the SAT hot-shots possess. So even if the universities are unlikely to admit what they’re doing, they’re actions reveal that they understand what they’re doing.

Under a signaling-theory-based defense of the SAT, accurate student-school matchmaking is important because failing to connect the most talented people with the highest paying or most selective jobs begets inefficiency. But does that even fully make sense? While IQ positively correlates with earnings, the notion that suitability for the most high-paying and selective jobs is perfectly forecast by academic finesse is improbable.

Hardcore SAT supporters might—like meritocracy loyalists often do—present nightmarish hypos that suggest retiring the SAT will produce a society besieged by bungling surgeons or innumerate accountants or whatever. But jobs with a defined skill set and where something can go haywire presumably have some internal gauge of competency before they hand over the keys to fresh-faced college grads, and to the extent they do require a college education, they hardly rely on the SAT. Medical schools largely rely on the MCAT, medical residencies use USMLE step scores, and so on. Other folks take GMATs, LSATs, CPA exams, GRE subject tests, etc. Few professionals are chosen for selective careers without suffering through multiple layers of standardized tests, so this narrative painting the SAT as some lone numerical bulwark against omnipresent incompetency of some career-by-lottery scheme is just histrionics. Maybe someplace like BCG will have to expand the coterie of schools that they haunt to round up their yearly crop of National Merit Scholars or whatever. Big deal.

Ultimately, the claim that scuttling the SAT will have a huge negative impact undermines itself. If society’s crucial jobs do get flooded with dummies then shouldn’t the employers be able to differentiate between the fit and unfit workers? If the employers can’t readily discern between who would have scored well on the SAT and who wouldn’t have, then it must not be such a big fucking deal! Convictions that reshuffling SAT results would impart a long-lasting fingerprint on economic arrangements is an admission that either the difference in performance isn’t noticeable or the markets have utterly failed.

Even if we cosign the crackbrained idea that universities should be charged with the responsibility of coordinating our labor markets via circuitous signaling routines, it isn’t obvious that the scheme is even that good at signaling. Are the most promising college applicants invariably the most promising job applicants? Is it really optimal to be so single-minded in our methods for talent discovery? The system is awful sparing with second chances and disconcertingly confident in projecting professional aptitude from the comparative maturity of teenagers. Even if the method is surprisingly dependable, I worry this combo just obliterates too much hope from the world. The SAT indelibly brands people with a badge of relative competency in a society that increasingly values little else. The fact that people get so foamy-mouthed about the particularities of college admissions desiderata is already a sign that something has gone badly wrong.

Is the SAT Integral to University Admissions?

For conventional wisdom about the SAT to be accurate, not only must the SAT be useful in creating matches between students and universities that markedly benefit society, but also no rival sorting procedure should be able to outpace something like the SAT or achieve similar results in a less painful way. The arguments above focused on dispelling the presumed economic importance of precise university-student match-making, but does something like the SAT perform other crucial societal functions like greasing the wheels of class mobility?

Logically, a good standardized test should be refreshingly neutral compared with fuzzy/expensive criteria like extracurriculars or measures susceptible to teachers’ biases like grades and recommendations. Freddie deBoer argues that the SAT is more immune to corruption from access to tutoring than metrics like high school GPA. I grant his point, and so you'd think that relying more heavily on grades (over the SAT) would disadvantage poorer students, but that could still be wrong, because schools are economically stratified, and well-heeled students are therefore mainly trying to out-tutor each other. If you concentrate on class rank, for example, some students from an impoverished neighborhood and attending a crummy school will still be in the top 5% of their class by definition, but there’s no such guarantee that any of them will score within the top 5% on the SAT. Surprisingly, then, it’s possible the SAT ossifies class structure more than it generates turnover even if it is less hackable.

The majority of SAT controversies focus on this amazingly narrow suite of issues like how well it predicts college performance, whether it favors rich kids more than grades do, or whether it's racist (to the particular advantage of Asian students, apparently). And some of these questions require exceedingly fastidious analysis, given that the SAT's imperfections must be evaluated in comparison to the imperfections of rival criteria, and also the analyses are riddled with subtleties like how the SAT could be especially powerful in differentiating applicants to elite schools who all have straight A’s, or how the predictive power of the SAT could be understated by low-scorers discontinuing their education and therefore self-excluding from measurement. I'll leave the granular and technical infighting to others.

Intelligence and class have become so intermixed in modern America that I’m curious whether admissions radically differ either way. The SAT may be more impervious to the side effects of moneyed parents than captaining the golf team or landing a coveted internship, but given the socioeconomic skew of SAT scores, it’s not like it’s a potent driver of class mobility: affluent students have a 20% chance at scoring over 1400, whereas students from families in very poor circumstances only have a 2% chance.² And per the matching argument discussed supra, even if ditching the SAT would dilute the intellectual mix a skosh, it’s just non-obvious that preferring equity over efficiency would be nearly as apocalyptic as everyone supposes, since elite schools don’t have a special super-secret cache of knowledge and so few people are really there to learn stuff anyway.

Also, while some claim that the SAT permits upward mobility by selecting talent in a comparably objective manner, others insist that the SAT’s quasi-objective scoring does important work by stamping out any temptation to unduly boost upward mobility through gimmicks like affirmative action. But these competing justifications nearly cancel out, and it sometimes seems like the SAT supporters want to have it both ways.

Really, the SAT outcome that aligns with diversity interests and also boosts signaling efficiency is that men outperform women on math and are likelier to earn the uppermost math scores, despite the fact that women have better grades and vastly outnumber men at universities now. Teenage guys plainly do better with the SAT than with ingratiating themselves with teachers and diligently completing assignments. This is both unsurprising and particularly salient at the elite level: roughly twice as many males score an 800 on the math section than females, despite women now making up about 70% of valedictorians.

A related defense of the SAT (or something like it) is that it reveals hidden gems. This diamonds-in-the-rough theory was the original motivation for incorporating the SAT,³ and when admissions to Ivy League schools were handed out like business cards, and the prevailing norm was to forgo college, the idea was persuasive. But very few ambitious or gifted people are evading detection nowadays, given that the norms have been inverted, and now pretty much everyone with some minimal inclination at least gives college a shot. The notion that anything but a de minimis portion of talent will slip through the cracks without something like the SAT is suspect.

The reality SAT defenders must confront is that same motivations for reincorporating the SAT into college admissions also rationalize IQ testing by employers, and the current SAT-based educational hegemony is basically just IQ-testing-by-proxy. Employers merely rely on universities to administer IQ tests for them, and it’s unclear how this layer of half-baked deceit is worth such a roundabout approach. Why can’t we decouple IQ testing and higher ed?

Universities favor using the SAT to cull applicants partly because it predicts college performance, but that justification doesn’t square with their pretextual mission to equip students with usable human capital. And if we view the situation through the lens of signaling, then bifurcating the IQ testing and the assessments of other attributes helps to clarify the signal. Right now, the university’s brand and exclusivity are being used to signal IQ, and if we divorce those ventures, that should invite more competition, since sharp students can attend less fancy schools without fear that they’re undercutting their job market indicators. Let businesses and professional schools determine whether pseudo-academic testing (rather than a tailored skills assessment) is truly required to select promising job candidates.

Suppose we awarded college admission by lottery, dispensed with grading, and just wholly sabotaged college as a signaling mechanism; ideally, businesses would be incentivized and flexible enough to adjust their hiring practices and the pressures of the marketplace would speedily rectify any talent shortfall. Employers must be capable of assessing the relevant capabilities for a job in a more tailored and germane way. Maybe retracting the crutch of university-based sorting will galvanize open-mindedness about hiring by forcing firms to assess candidates by trial runs or other criteria pertinent to the job performance beyond general intelligence and conformity.

Conclusion

Some people dislike the SAT because they’re skeptical of its psychometric validity and are convinced that it’s incurably racist or something, which is so inflammatory and controversial that it distracts from a stockpile of more surefooted motivations for unease. But in a culture wherein leftists think that the SAT is racially biased, paranoid conservatives view universities as some kind of esoteric conversion therapy that spits out communist degrowthers, and perceptive commentators are busy painting warning signs about the discontents of meritocracy, the steadfast loyalty to the SAT is puzzling.

I’m not so doubtful about the predictive value of the SAT, but it’s also not an aspect of modern America that deserves protection at all costs. I particularly struggle to understand the urgency of reinstalling SAT-based admissions given how it’s the very backbone of our failed post-war higher-ed extravaganza. Even supposing that you reject the mounting critiques of meritocracy, the drawbacks of operating that meritocracy via the universities are too severe to stomach much longer, and the dynamics of this education craze have triggered an unstoppable arms race for highly ranked credentials that’s become a cultural black hole. It remorselessly sucks up and annihilates energy, talent, money, and time, just to grow even more massive.

But then, even if we insist on clutching to the university-based sorting machine and dumping more and more youth into the hopper, it’s still unclear whether reintroducing the SAT is so essential in our modern context. And even if it is necessary, it’s still not something to be excitedly self-righteous about. The SAT is basically like the sorting hat from Harry Potter, but instead of placing wizards into Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw, it’s actuating an immutable intellectual caste system. Maybe, to borrow from Churchill (who borrowed this from somebody else), it’s the worst system aside from every other one we’ve tried, but it’s a dubious rallying point for the guardians of a good and decent society.

The SAT should only be a cherished institution for a minority of terminally hubristic high-scorers who wind up viewing their largely innate cognitive abilities as virtuous and desert-entailing for the remainder of their life because of this damn test being intermixed with more effort-/education-sensitive application criteria. Hyping up the SAT’s resurrection belies an unthinking allegiance to the existing meritocracy: it’s a characteristic reflex of bourgeoisie dispositions more than a well-formed viewpoint. And I won’t rest my argument upon it, but it’s difficult to completely eschew suspicions that the pro-SAT commentariat’s identity, self-esteem, and socioeconomic standing are tied up with a lifetime of stuff like doing well on the SAT.

Regardless of whether reinstating the SAT was an error, I’m doubly perplexed by folks being amped about it. Whether it’s incrementally beneficial shouldn’t really matter, because and the current system is so dysfunctional that the hypothesized marginal improvement is irrelevant over the long run. The best case for resurrecting the SAT is that it’s akin to building a hammock when you’re trapped on a desert island—a moderate improvement of your conditions, but you still ultimately need to fashion a means of escape or rescue.

1. Sandel, Michael J., The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find The Common Good? Picador (2021): 172; See generally Chapter 6.

2. Id. at 164.

3. Id. at 158.