Op-Ed: The SATs Should Be Abolished

The SAT, a test which has been used to assess high-school students since 1926, has faced recent criticism about its effectiveness and the belief that the test creates an unlevel playing field (Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash).

It's time for the Scholastic Assessment Test, also known as the SAT, to be abolished. For many years, students have been required to take SATs to get into college. However, amid recent criticism that the tests cater to higher-income families and are an ineffective measure of a student's intelligence, they are slowly being eradicated as a mandate in students' applications. 

CEO of Command Education, a college consulting company, Christopher Rim, writes in It’s Time to Abolish the SAT: "It's time they look up from their iPads and computer screens and look at their prospective students for who they are as people." In recent years, colleges have been trying to look at students' success holistically, and as a result, many schools are going test-optional. SATs have become a measure of resources rather than a measure of intelligence. 

The College Board has been critiqued for its greed; more specifically, a nonprofit organization has a monopoly over standardized exams. They continue to make over a billion dollars in revenue a year; however, the problem does not lie in their revenue. The problem lies in the fact that the supposedly nonprofit boards executives make prodigious amounts of money. According to the Washington Post: These four charts show how the SAT favors rich, educated families, The CEO, David Coleman, earned 1.67 million dollars in 2019, while nine other board members made 500,000 dollars in compensation. 

Another problem that the SAT faces is that the test caters to higher-income families who can afford specialists. Deputy Business Editor of the Washington Post and Browning Alum Zachary Goldfarb '01 asserts: "Students from families earning more than $200,000 a year average a combined score of 1,714, while students from families earning under $20,000 a year average a combined score of 1,326." 

Not only is there a clear correlation between affluence and high SAT scores, but there is also a correlation between students from educated families achieving higher scores. Goldfarb continues: "A student with a parent with a graduate degree, for example, on average scores 300 points higher on their SATs compared to a student with a parent with only a high school degree." 

This dispels the notion of the "American Dream." The American Dream is the concept that everyone, regardless of where they were born or what social class they came from, may achieve their version of success in a society where everyone has the opportunity to advance.

The SAT is an antiquated test that has transformed into an unfair and ineffective way to measure students' intelligence.