Is the SAT Obsolete?
10.22.21
“Standardized testing has always been a progressive idea. It disrupts class and race, unseats entrenched privilege, and offers the poor and the marginalized their best chance of social mobility,” wrote Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, after the University of California became the largest public university system to permanently abandon the SAT and ACT in its admissions process last year.
Sullivan is one of a dwindling number of defenders: today, the SAT is an endangered species, increasingly under fire for promoting racism and, if anything, further entrenching wealth divides. This year, students rejoiced as a record number of U.S. colleges went test-optional, with over three-quarters of schools bypassing the admissions requirement for fall 2022.
But this sudden fall from grace should come as no surprise: contrary to Sullivan’s rosy vision of the SAT, the test wasn’t always used for such saintly objectives. It has long been a controversial tool, periodically picked up by various interest groups, each seeking to craft their own definition of American ability and excellence.
This week, as our high-school seniors breathe a collective sigh of relief, we discuss the rise and fall of the iconic SAT: how it sprang from the imagination of a crackpot eugenicist, only to be co-opted by a trailblazing radical, before sliding into the commercialized reign of terror most of us still suffer PTSD from today.
The Birth of the SAT
Carl Brigham — the OG designer of the SAT — was a prominent eugenicist who drank his way through Princeton, only to stun his peers by pursuing a career in the trailblazing field of social science. Brigham became one of the nation’s first experts in intelligence testing and helped administer Army IQ tests during World War I. His voice bolstered the panicked chorus of self-appointed race theorists, who believed that the country was in imminent decline thanks to the immigrant dilution of “native stocks.”
Early IQ tests were primarily used to validate racial stereotypes and hierarchies. In 1980, James Fallows of The Atlantic wrote a two-part series on the troubling origins of the SAT, which Brigham adapted from crude IQ tests. “In 1912, on the basis of tests run at Ellis Island, Henry Goddard scientifically proved that 83 percent of Jews were ‘feebleminded,’ along with 90 percent of Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians, and 81 percent of Russians (most of them Russian Jews),” reported Fallows.
English-language word familiarity (the bulk of IQ tests), it turns out, will not reflect kindly on non-English speakers. Fallows added: “Modern ETS researchers recall with sad smiles the miraculous finding, some years after the Ellis Island tests, that Jews and Italians improved dramatically in intelligence after they had lived in the country for a while, and that their children, raised as English-speakers, seemed somehow to have been spared their parents’ feebleminded genes.”
But it was too late. Brigham took the Army IQ tests — which so “faithfully … reproduce[d] the social order” — and made them harder. He called his new creation the Standardized Aptitude Test, which was first administered to over 8,000 high-school students on June 23rd, 1926.
Ironically, Brigham was one of the first to realize that the SAT didn’t measure what it purported to: aptitude aka “native intelligence.” After less than a decade of results, he concluded that it was more like an achievement test: “The test movement came to this country some twenty-five or thirty years ago accompanied by one of the most glorious fallacies in the history of science, namely, that the tests measure native intelligence purely and simply without regard to training or scoring,” wrote Brigham. Instead, the SAT was very much a product of students’ environment and upbringing. It was nothing more than a composite of “schooling, family background, familiarity with English, and everything else, relevant and irrelevant.”
The SAT Gets Radicalized
A few decades later, the SAT found a nobler mission than eugenics: it became the principal tool used by radicals to dethrone the upper classes. How did it adopt such a changed character? James Conant Bryant — a “thin, severe, bespectacled chemist” — was appointed as the first Harvard president from a low-income background, and he believed fervently in its equalizing capabilities.
Harvard’s admission requirements had slowly eroded during the Depression — nearly any “paying guest” was welcomed with open arms at an institution “whose endowment relied heavily on inherited wealth and trust funds.” As president, Conant was disgusted by the “privileged sloth” showcased by students on campus. Studiousness was hardly a virtue: most students adopted a “high-living, racoon-coated Prohibition era” lifestyle. They lived in private apartments along the Gold Coast district, were attended by butlers and maids, and only deigned to study (with the help of specialized tutoring schools) at the end of each semester just in time to scrape through exams. The few partial scholarship students among them were marked by “badges of poverty” and lived under constant threat of losing their funds should they fail to perform academically (while also holding down a job).
Appalled, Conant published a cry for reform — “Wanted: Americans Radicals” — in the May of 1943 Atlantic Monthly. He called for a political radical — drawn from the intellectual heritage of Jefferson, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and the like — who would take an “ax against the root of inherited privilege.”
The article went down “like a lead balloon with Harvard’s Brahmin hierarchy,” and garnered an 8-page critique from Thomas Lamont, a generous alumnus and Chairman of J. P. Morgan. Unflummoxed, Conant doubled-down with an 18-page rebuttal, where he urged the government “to confiscate (by constitutional methods) all property once a generation” and to devise a new system of inheritance taxes that eliminated loopholes such as trusts and gifts. Lamont’s last word on the subject was a faint scribble in the margin: “Sic! From the President of Harvard!”
Conant soon adopted the SAT to implement a revolutionary scholarship program of need-blind, full-aid admissions, ushering in a new era of test-based meritocracy. He believed that the SAT — which was supposedly an aptitude test, rather than achievement test — could not be gamed by rich families. Instead, it would act as a national, objective talent finder that could sift through America’s vast public school system, which was governed by over 15,000 school boards. By the time Conant retired in 1953, the SAT had acquired a weighty significance at every selective college, a privilege that would not be relinquished for over seventy years.
Is the SAT Racist?
The idea that the SAT is a simple aptitude test, no different than a blood test or urine sample, was abandoned the moment John Katzman founded The Princeton Review in 1981. He set off a $1.2 billion tutoring and test prep industry by debunking the idea that a person’s SAT scores were destined by innate capability. Instead, he told students and parents, anyone could ace the test, so long as they had enough time, practice, and money.
“I remember when John Katzman … introduced us to The Princeton Review,” said Ted O’Neill, former dean of admissions at the University of Chicago. “We thought of course he was evil because he was destroying the myth that we had this instrument that could level the playing field and tell us something about a person’s mind rather than background, or the luck of the teachers he had, or the parents he had. And here he was telling us, ‘I know this is a game, and we can figure this out.’”
Today, the SAT finds itself in the crosshairs of critical race theorists (CRT), who contend that standardized tests simply reinforce and legitimize existing inequalities. “We’re not supposed to be talking about the fact that all Boston children do not have equal access to high quality test preparation — and it’s impossible to create that equal access,” said Ibram X. Kendi, one of CRT’s most prominent leaders. “It is like allowing some NFL teams more time to practice in the offseason and when those teams regularly win the Super Bowl somehow claiming the rules are fair.”
At the same time, however, a growing contingent of Asian-Americans (now considered “white-adjacent” by CRT theorists) are launching an organized defensive in the name of meritocracy. Asian-Americans have historically trounced other racial groups on standardized tests and tend to be “overrepresented” in elite school systems (in the UC school system, for example, 34% of UC undergraduates are Asian or Pacific Islander, as compared with 12% of K-12 students).
“There were just too many Asians,” writes journalist and author Kenny Xu in his new release, An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy. Thomas Jefferson, the top high-school in the country, once had a student body that was nearly 68% Asian. That all changed after 2020, when the prestigious high-school scrapped admissions testing requirements in favor of a merit-based lottery system (early estimates found that the Asian population would drop by 55%, while the white population would climb by 24%.)
Seeking proportional representation in the name of equity, many argue, simply purges Asians in favor of whites, while sacrificing educational excellence to boot.
What Will Replace the SAT?
Many consider UC’s momentous decision to abandon the SAT as its final death knell. “It’s only a matter of time before other public systems follow suit,” says Angel Pérez, head of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “They’re going to learn how to do admissions without the tests.”
What, then, will schools replace it with? Some, such as John Katzman, have proposed a “basket of tests,” each created by a different textbook company or curriculum provider to prevent a duopoly and increase student choice. Others, such as UC, are creating a proprietary test system to be used exclusively by the state of California.
Still others have suggested keeping the SAT but adjusting it for socioeconomic status to ensure more class-based diversity. Not surprisingly, that got shut down. (“Imagine the hell that would break loose if the idea were instituted and every lawyer’s and doctor’s kid in America got an envelope in the mail containing a score that had been adjusted downward to account for the parents’ high socioeconomic status?” wrote one SAT scholar.)
Regardless of what replacement is chosen, the final product will no doubt reflect this generation’s vision of educational excellence, no matter how hooky later generations may regard it.
John Adams, after much anguished back-and-forth with Thomas Jefferson about how to best find and educate the next generation’s elite, concluded that it didn’t really matter: “Your distinction between the aristoi and pseudo aristoi, will not help the matter,” wrote Adams. “I would trust one as Soon as the other with unlimited Power.”
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