It’s Time to Trash the SATs, a Bad Test Born Out of Bad Race ‘Science’
The virus has weakened the grip of a test created by a white supremacist who warned against “promiscuous intermingling” of the races.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
COVID-19, which has caused so much damage to America, might also be what finally kills the SAT and ACT, the high-stakes college admissions tests administered by the Educational Testing Service and that largely determine access to higher education. In a typical year, 77 percent of high school graduates took these tests. This year it was only 44 percent. That is a seismic shift, and one worth cheering should it prove permanent.
Generations of high school students have stressed over the 70-year-old SAT test while parents with the means pay test prep and tutors enough to support a $30 billion test-prep industry that’s helped to widen the American opportunity gap, with the haves accumulating advantages while the have-nots don’t even know the rules of the game they are playing.
For nearly as long as the test has been around, educational researchers have decried the unfairness of this system, and the pressures and anxieties it has placed on young men and women. They have pointed out how students from marginalized communities see limited access to higher education.
