In a scathing essay in TIME magazine, Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, lacerates the SAT.

The recently announced changes, he writes, are “too little, too late,” and are motivated mainly by the competition between the SAT and the ACT, which now tests more students than the SAT.

What Botstein makes clear is that the hoops and hurdles of the SAT are archaic and have little, if anything, to do with being well prepared for college.

He writes:

The SAT needs to be abandoned and replaced. The SAT has a status as a reliable measure of college readiness it does not deserve. The College Board has successfully marketed its exams to parents, students, colleges and universities as arbiters of educational standards. The nation actually needs fewer such exam schemes; they damage the high school curriculum and terrify both students and parents.

The blunt fact is that the SAT has never been a good predictor of academic achievement in college. High school grades adjusted to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates are. The essential mechanism of the SAT, the multiple choice test question, is a bizarre relic of long outdated twentieth century social scientific assumptions and strategies. As every adult recognizes, knowing something or how to do something in real life is never defined by being able to choose a “right” answer from a set of possible answers (some of them intentionally misleading) put forward by faceless test designers who are rarely eminent experts. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician—and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member—pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.

The testing “experts” who write questions for the College Board or for Pearson or for McGraw Hill or for any of the other testing giants are seldom (if ever) scholars. The review process for the questions and answers is highly bureaucratic. And the scoring of the essays–which will now be abandoned on the SAT–are often done by people hired from Craig’s List and working for $11 an hour (or less). To learn more about the unsavory practices of the testing industry, read Todd Farley’s Making the Grades, which tells the sad story of the fifteen years he spent in that particular line of work.

Botstein goes on to criticize the value of the SAT:

First, despite the changes, these tests remain divorced from what is taught in high school and what ought to be taught in high school. Second, the test taker never really finds out whether he or she got any answer right or wrong and why. No baseball coach would train a team by accumulating an aggregate comparative numerical score of errors and well executed plays by each player, rating them, and then send them the results weeks later. When an error is committed it is immediately noted; the reasons are explained and the coach, at a moment in time close to the event, seeks to train the player how not to do it again.

What purpose is served by putting young people through an ordeal from which they learn nothing?

He ends on a hopeful note:

The time has come for colleges and universities to join together with the most innovative software designers to fundamentally reinvent a college entrance examination system.

I do not share his optimism. Since everyone, including David Coleman, the president of the College Board, agrees that high school grades say more about a student’s readiness for college than a one-shot college entrance examination, I doubt that even our most innovative software designers can come up with an examination that will mean more than reviewing students’ transcripts and other evidence of what they studied and how they showed their interests and commitments during their time in high school.

Competition to get into a prestigious college has grown incredibly fierce; going to the “right” college is seen as the key to a high-status occupation; the SAT and the ACT are not likely to give up their role as gatekeepers for these institutions; and as we know from ample research, the students who lose in this competition are those whose families lack the income, the connections, and the social status to compete. We are indeed in a testing quagmire. The best way to end it is if more and more colleges and universities go “test-optional,” that is, abandon the SAT and ACT as requirements for admission. This is one instance where the market might actually work, if the institutions are wise enough to take heed of the research on what matters most in picking their freshman class.