After joining many other universities and colleges in suspending the use of the SAT in admissions — a trend Jon Boeckenstedt wrote about approvingly in the Review — MIT has reinstated the test “for future admissions cycles.” In a statement, MIT’s admissions dean, Stu Schmill, explains that the ability to complete the school’s extremely demanding math curriculum — a general requirement for all MIT undergraduates — is “significantly” predicted by SAT performance.
For Boeckenstedt, conversely, tests do “little to predict anything other than parental income.” The debate is an old one, and its terms have barely altered in the last 60 years. In their classic The Academic Revolution (1968), Christopher Jencks and David Riesman describe a situation that could be transposed almost detail for detail to the present. “Until very recently,” they write, “most educators saw tests as a democratizing rather than an aristocratizing element.” But mounting evidence showing that test scores were positively correlated with socioeconomic status threatened the notion that higher education was an agent of American social mobility.
Plus ça change. Jencks and Riesman, too, were concerned that expanding higher education could intensify social stratification. But they defended the validity of tests for predicting college performance. In their view, testing didn’t produce disparities in opportunity but merely reflected them: “Those who look askance at testing should not, then, rest their case on the simple notion that tests are ‘unfair to the poor.’ Life is unfair to the poor. Tests merely measure the results.”
Jencks and Riesman also observe that alternative entrance criteria might be even more class-linked than standardized tests, and MIT’s Schmill agrees: “Not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education.” In other words, less-privileged students have few arenas (like advanced high-school coursework) beyond the SAT to show that they have what it takes to succeed at MIT.
It remains to be seen whether MIT’s recent move will be a harbinger of a more general return to testing (my guess is yes). In any case, research on the usefulness of testing will continue, and debates over its implementation will involve fraught political questions around race, class, access, and democracy. Beyond these concerns, though, lies a larger one. Testing arouses a quasi-religious anxiety about determinism and human predictability. As one admissions professional at a public university in Texas put it, “Students are more than just a number, and our policies must adhere to that value.” From this point of view, there is something metaphysically dehumanizing about tests: To be “just a number,” whether that number is a 1600 or a 750, is to be degraded. These concerns are persistent and acute — and all the more so if the tests seem to work.
