New York Instances Op-Ed:  Can the Meritocracy Survive With out the SAT?, by Ross Douthat:

The fast abandonment of the SAT and ACT as necessities for school admissions, to the purpose the place greater than 80 p.c of four-year schools didn’t require a standardized take a look at for admission within the coming fall, is a milestone within the historical past of the fashionable meritocracy. What stays to be seen is whether or not it’s a marker on the highway to the meritocracy’s demise.

From the start meritocratic tradition and standardized testing have been inextricably intertwined. The transformation of America’s elite schools in the midst of the twentieth century, from upper-class ending colleges into fashionable “multiversities” supposedly open to all comers, was pushed and justified by the SAT, which was supposed to supply an equal-opportunity technique of ascent and bonafide the brand new elite with numerical proof of its brainpower.

For a very long time meritocracy’s skeptics, left and proper, have famous that the brand new system created an higher class that appears as privileged and insular because the previous one. And in keeping with among the SAT’s critics, it’s exactly this criticism that’s motivating the present shift away from standardized exams — the concept that they’re inherently biased towards children from well-off households and {that a} extra holistic definition of benefit will open extra alternatives for the meritorious poor and center class.

There are causes to be uncertain of this account.

First, it appears fairly clear that many faculties are actually ditching the SAT in response to the next sequence of occasions: Asian American SAT scores rose to the purpose the place elite schools had been accused of discriminating in opposition to Asian American candidates to take care of the racial stability they desired, this led to lawsuits, and people lawsuits appear poised to yield a Supreme Court docket ruling in opposition to affirmative motion. So universities are pre-emptively abandoning a metric that could be used in opposition to them in future litigation, not for the sake of widening alternative however simply within the hopes of sustaining the admissions established order.

Second, whereas SAT scores are linked to household revenue, the hyperlink is not as tight as critics generally counsel, and standardized exams are in all probability a much less class-bound metric than many issues that go into extra “holistic” assessments. …

[We may end up with] an elite-school inhabitants that’s extra privileged and fewer academically aggressive and a bigger inhabitants of sensible children from nonelite backgrounds who merely aren’t recruited into the system anymore.

This mixture could be good for America in the long term — fostering a higher regional dispersal of expertise, breaking the meritocracy-versus-populism stalemate, weakening the affect of the Ivy League.

However it might symbolize the dying of the meritocracy as we now have recognized it, and previous orders don’t normally go down with out a combat.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/05/ny-times-op-ed-can-the-meritocracy-survive-without-the-sat-and-lsat.html