I thought this part was interesting, because among this particular audience, it would seem to be an argument for keeping the SAT:
Now consider high-ability students in mediocre schools who do not play the classroom game. They are bored with their classes and sometimes get Bs and the occasional C, but they have active minds and are looking for ways to occupy themselves. They spend all their time on the debate team or writing for the high school newspaper, or in the drama department. By the end of high school, they have a long list of accomplishments studding their applications. One way or the other, by the end of high school, students in this category are very likely to have done things that will catch the attention of an admissions officer. And again, their achievement test scores are high. These students are at least as intellectually curious as those who play the game. Their Bs do not mean they didn’t absorb the substance of the coursework, and they too have typically encountered and retained large amounts of information outside school.
That leaves the worst case: high-ability students who are alienated by school and perhaps by life. They don’t study, don’t go out for the debate team, don’t read on their own, don’t even watch the Discovery Channel. It is possible for them nonetheless to achieve a high score on an individually administered IQ test, despite being hostile and uninterested. Arthur Jensen relates the time he was testing a sullen subject in a juvenile detention facility and came to the vocabulary item “apocryphal.” The boy answered, “How the hell should I know? I think the whole Bible is [bunk].” In an individually administered IQ test, the examiner could score his answer as correct, but that same alienated boy is unlikely to get a high score on the SAT because no one, no matter how smart, gets a high score on the SAT without concentrating and trying hard over the course of three stressful hours. So keeping the SAT will not help most students in this category. They won’t try hard, and their SAT scores will be mediocre despite their ability.
That leaves an extremely odd set of high-ability students who will be harmed by dropping the SAT—so alienated that they do nothing to express their ability in school, so completely walled off from independent learning that they do poorly on the achievement tests, and yet able to buckle down on the SAT and get a good score. I am not sure that getting a good score under such circumstances is even possible on the SAT Math—too many of the questions presuppose hard work in algebra class—but perhaps it could be done on the SAT Verbal.
In any case, we are now talking about a very few students, and even for them it is not clear whether dropping the SAT introduces an injustice. Should such a student be given a slot that could have been filled by a less-talented student who is eager to give a competitive college his best effort? Being forced to go to an unselective college instead could well be the better outcome for all concerned.
We here are a population of parents whose children are at high risk for exactly the kind of situation the author outlines. Our children are high ability students, many of us are dealing with mediocre schools, and tuning out is something our children are highly likely to do.
What the author outlines is such a student receiving Bs and the occasional C, and getting into a college that's not so selective. Fine... a rejection letter from Harvard or Stanford isn't the end of the world. But what about the students who are so tuned out they're getting mostly Cs and Ds, just putting in enough work to get by? After a period in the real world, they find something to be passionate about, and decide to get an education, but their grades are so poor that no university wants them, and they're encouraged to prove themselves through the local JC... which has the qualities of their high school that made them quit caring in the first place.
The SAT opens the door to a freshman year at a real university for such a student. It's a second chance.
