By Sidney Brant

As seniors decide whether or not to submit SAT scores, and juniors prepare to take the test for the first time, many students contemplate the same question: what’s the point? It seems ludicrous to spend dozens of hours re-learning freshman year trig and how to apply grammar rules to heinously written passages for questions that may or may not be on a test that you may or may not submit to the college of your choice. This is precisely what makes the SAT so frustrating- it is a test on a test, and therein lies its ingenuity. 

Upon its inception in 1926, the SAT was intended to create a meritocratic standard for college admissions and help colleges distinguish academically worthy applicants who were biologically and innately the most intelligent. The reason that sounds an awful lot like race science is because it is. Carl Brigham, the architect of the SAT wrote in his 1923 book A Study of American Intelligence, that American education “will proceed [declining] with an accelerating rate as the racial mixture becomes more and more extensive.” The SAT corroborated Brigham’s findings and was largely used as a tool for keeping non-whites out of higher education. There is no evidence to suggest that anyone working for the Educational Testing Service is deliberately constructing a test that puts students of color at a disadvantage. However, race and gender biases in the SAT are still prevalent. 

Every question on the SAT goes through rigorous testing through which the college board’s goal is to make sure that the test is “fair to all students”, and “written in a way that models what students are learning in the best high school classrooms.” During pretesting, sample students take a test consisting of possible questions, and the questions that make it through the pretesting onto the real SAT are the ones that reflect the intended overall outcome of the SAT. Because of this, it’s natural that the questions that higher-scoring students get correct are kept, and questions that lower-scoring students get correct are much more likely to be cut. Though race is not considered, because the best scorers tend to be in the upper quartile of family income and consequently are more likely to be white, the questions that make it through pretesting and onto the real SAT overwhelmingly favor white upper middle-class students at well-funded schools. Additionally, the subjects and concepts that are familiar or intuitive to test takers can be dependent on class and culture. Because of this, the SAT’s strategy for making consistent tests year after year perpetuates existing biases. 

Does this detract from the credibility of the SAT itself, or is the bias of the test inevitable in a world with implicit bias? Recent statistics have shown that the score gap between students of color and white students has shrunk in the past ten years. Proponents of the SAT claim the test is a tool for students from underfunded, underperforming schools to boost their chances of admissions at competitive schools by being able to control a variable of their resume, unlike other metrics that depend greatly upon what courses your school offers and who teaches them. Even though the nationwide standardized test is available to practically every high schooler in America, tutors and thousand-dollar test prep packages are not, and students at prep schools with resources for SAT prep tend to get higher scores. 

The genius and tragedy of the SAT lies in its content. Because the test has to be feasible for every high schooler in America, the questions have to be about subjects that every test taker is familiar with at a universal level. Even if you are not familiar with a specific algebraic function, the general concept has to be commonplace enough that it can be self-studied without a teacher. This means that test makers have to employ simple concepts in complicated questions so that millions of kids in all higher-level courses aren’t maxing out with 1600’s at minimal effort.

Another way the test is made universal is through the variety and breadth of the questions. Up to 30 topics each are tested in reading, writing, and math. Even though the topics aren’t new, there is one foreign concept that requires studying and training from the ground up: the SAT itself. I don’t mean the math and writing skills that you are being tested on, but the nature of the test itself. Because of the clever ways the test is made to be universal, it is unlike any test that most students experience during their years in school. As the test evaluates how well you can take the test, and not necessarily the subject of the questions, the content of the test is without substance. Test takers who want to devote time to studying for the test are not necessarily learning new concepts, and the strategies they are learning aren’t applicable to college assessments or even other standardized high school assessments (excluding the ACT), like AP tests. Because the SAT is a test on how well you can take the SAT, not necessarily how much you know about math and grammar, it is somewhat antithetical to education and the learning process.

The SAT, though, is not without value in terms of assessing students’ skill sets. It is certainly a useful indicator of quick analytical thinking, however, the scope of what it can tell a college admissions officer is extremely narrow, which is why many schools are going test-optional to focus on “holistic admissions”. A repercussion of this though, is that only students with scores above the 95th percentile tend to submit at test-optional schools so as to not hurt their chances with an average score. This means that the mean score has increased significantly at many competitive schools, narrowing the range of scores that students are willing to submit. Test-optional policies have also led to a significant increase in applicants at top schools who no longer have to submit a score that is significantly below the school’s average.

Does this mean the SAT will be obsolete soon? Probably not. It is still a valuable metric for colleges despite its deemphasis in the admissions process. Plus, college board executives have to eat somehow! Juniors wondering if they should take it definitely should, trying can’t hurt you (if you don’t let it) or your chances of getting into college. Just don’t agonize over it, and don’t prioritize it over schoolwork or activities that colleges may also find valuable.