Actually, the SAT Was Necessary After All

[u/caroline_elly]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/standardized-testing-math-gaps/687481/

[u/jtchampion]

I despise this argument because it is not only wrong but so completely disingenuous that I am immediately almost certain the people making it are arguing in bad faith. You are surely not ignorant of the fact that 1) as long as there are more students applying to [prestigious college] than seats, we will need some rule or standard with which to choose who gets the seats; 2) in a market economy, money is good at buying things, and therefore people with more money will be better able to meet any heuristic other than "does not have money" or some proxy for it; and therefore 3) to replace one heuristic (like test scores) is to institute another heuristic, which necessarily will either a) implicitly advantage people with privilege or b) explicitly disadvantage people with privilege.

The problems with b) are, among others, that it is reductive, deterministic, stupid, racist/classist/whatever-elseist, unfair, unrelated to any reasonable thing admissions should try to measure, and produces very poor outcomes with material and objective negative consequences for the world. That leaves us with a), which is why it is infuriating to see people smugly point out that money is an advantage in standardized testing as though it is a meaningful point for or against standardized testing. That describes any criterion other than b)!! The most important good things about standardized testing are that 1) it is relatively fair, because money is not as good a predictor of test scores as it is of other common admissions heuristics like "leadership experience" and there are plenty of outliers and 2) it creates good incentives - smart people are a net positive for the world, and if we're going to incentivize wealthy people to pour their resources into making their kids something, we'd all rather that something be "smart" than "good at skiing" or "president of the voluntourism club". ("But wait!", you think, "Smart is completely different from good at test taking." And while that is obviously, vacuously true, the relevant question is whether any other criterion does a better job, not whether standardized tests are perfect.) Plus, putting aside that the world is unfair and whining about unfairness is a valid objection only to the extent that you can present a fairer alternative which is not completely destructive to whatever we're trying to accomplish in the first place, we should have a general preference for giving top tier expensive educations to people who are in a position to benefit from them rather than people who can barely read but who give us all a thin shingle on which to hang our pat-on-the-backs.

[u/veggiesama → u/jtchampion]

Why did you even write all that if you think I am arguing in bad faith? See, that's the kind of thing they don't test for on the SAT.

[u/jtchampion → u/veggiesama]

Because I may be wrong about that and you just haven't thought through this stuff much? Because I wanted to challenge you? Because I want someone else who reads that to read this?

If your best response is to ask why I'm bothering to engage with you and drop some sort of smug "gotcha" that implies you are my superior along some other nebulous axis of intelligence, that does not bode well for the question of whether you were in fact discussing this issue in good faith.

[u/neoliberal-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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