The SAT’s Comeback Is Good News for Minority Students

Standardized admissions tests have proved especially good at predicting performance of black college applicants.

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"Progressives reason that because black and Hispanic test-takers have tended to underperform relative to their white and Asian peers, the tests themselves must be biased. But whatever learning disparities are exposed when a 17-year-old sits down to take the SAT almost certainly developed much earlier in that student’s life.

As Harvard’s Robert Putnam has reported, before they even enter kindergarten, children from professional families hear some 19 million more words than children from lower-class backgrounds. The upshot is that, over time, the fifth-grader raised in a family on public assistance will have heard fewer words than the preschool child of an architect or dentist.

Mr. Kendi and other skeptics of standardized testing want to blame racial learning gaps on the SAT, but in many cases those gaps were present before the child even entered school and may have worsened over time. A U.S. Department of Education study found that black parents on average have half as many books in their home as white parents. Nor is this simply a matter of resources. Even wealthier black families tend to have fewer books than working-class whites. The SAT is revealing differences in current ability, not creating those differences. And scrapping the tests wouldn’t make those differences disappear.

Exams aren’t a perfect tool for vetting applicants, but they are superior to known alternatives. “Our analysis made clear that SAT and ACT scores are among the key indicators that help predict a student’s ability to succeed and thrive in Brown’s demanding academic environment,” the Ivy League school’s provost said in a statement last week. One irony of nixing the testing requirement to achieve greater diversity is that black, Hispanics and low-income students are among those who have the most to gain by keeping the requirement in place.

Opponents argue that the tests underestimate the academic abilities of underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities and that high-school grades are a better predictor of college performance. Among black students, however, SAT scores have proved the better predictor, and those scores haven’t underestimated how black applicants later performed in college.

If anything, the test has tended to overestimate black performance. Critics who want to move away from objective tests and toward more subjective measures of student capability—personality tests, for example—have yet to show that using more subjective criteria to evaluate applicants has the same predictive validity as the SAT.

When the Board of Regents of the University of California voted in 2021 to end the SAT and ACT requirement, it said the tests were biased against students from disadvantaged backgrounds. But Donald Wittman, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, argues in a new paper that the opposite is true, and more than 50 years of testing and hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific articles back him up. If the SAT and ACT were biased against low-income students, the score would underpredict their later performance in college. Instead, the tests tend to underpredict the college grades of wealthier test takers, suggesting that the bias runs the other way—against the affluent."