If blessed with excess applicants, how should colleges and universities screen and select those most likely to thrive academically, to graduate, and ultimately to vocationally succeed?
As a general rule, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Thus, high-achieving high school students, as reflected in their grades, will tend to become high-achieving college students. And of course, high school GPA reflects students’ combined ability and diligence—the very traits that will predict their success in college and beyond.
But then came grade inflation, with American applicants’ GPA now mostly ranging from 3.5 to 4.0, rather than the previous 2.5 to 4.0. And when the range of any predictor shrinks, so does its predictive power. Among women basketball players ranging from 5’0” to 6’4,” height will predict rebounds snagged, but much less so among those ranging from 6’1” to 6’4.”
With high school GPA having become less usefully predictive, admissions officers have looked to other indicators of potential student excellence. Using a more holistic process, they assess the lucidity of students’ essays. They take note of applicants’ extracurricular music lessons, international travel, and volunteerism. They may prioritize students from elite high schools. And they may also prioritize legacy students—those with family ties to, or financial gifts to, their school.
Such considerations privilege students from higher income families—those that can fund the best schooling, essay-writing coaches, and extracurricular enrichments for applicants who are less likely than lower-income students to be working after-school jobs. Thus, admissions officers have wished for a better way to identify overlooked talent in unexpected places.
From that wish was born test-based selection and the SAT (formerly Scholastic Aptitude Test). Harvard’s Steven Pinker notes that in its initial phase, from the 1930s through most of the twentieth century, standardized testing was “the enlightened policy . . . since it [could] level a hereditary caste system by favoring the Jenny Cavilleris (poor and smart) over the Oliver Barretts (rich and stupid).”
In a second phase, from the early 2000s through the Covid era, critics, mindful of test score disparities among income and racial groups, many argued that the SAT and its cousin, the ACT (originally American College Testing), were biased—with content that favored privileged social groups. To increase student diversity and preclude discrimination, many colleges therefore went test-optional or even “test blind.”
But standardized testing advocates cautioned against blaming tests for exposing unequal experiences. If, with malnutrition, young people suffer stunted growth, don’t blame the measuring stick that reveals it. If unequal past experiences affect future achievements, a valid aptitude test will detect such. And an unbiased test will have the same predictive validity—it will work equally well—for people of any social group. Such is the SAT. The SAT correlates about +.5 with first-year undergraduate GPA—and does so for Black students as for White students, for women as for men, for lower-income as for higher-income applicants.
This is roughly equivalent to the predictive power of today’s high school GPA across a diverse sample of U.S. colleges and universities. (Before the increase in grade inflation, high school GPA was the better predictor.) So, for most American schools, high school GPA and the SAT (or ACT) both provide useful information.
But among highly selective schools, for which applicant GPAs tend to be uniformly high, “high school GPA and class rank now offer little additional predictive power,” notes a new analysis by Dartmouth economists. Likewise, at the selective University of California, Berkeley, “test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average.” Ditto the Ivy League and sister schools.
The Dartmouth researchers also document how test-optional policies at selective schools “disproportionately harm” high-achieving applicants “from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
In the absence of the standardized tests, selection becomes more arbitrary and subject to family privilege bias. How does one pick among all the eager 4.0 students? Thus, although most colleges in 2025 remain test-optional, MIT, Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth, among others, have returned to requiring standardized tests.
In defense of this current third phase—judicious aptitude test use by selective schools or for competitive scholarships—educational researchers have reemphasized these key points:
- Aptitude tests work. They predict not just college grades, but college persistence through graduation, later vocational success, and even life longevity. Twelve-year olds with SAT scores approximating a top 5 percent college applicant have later earned doctorates at twenty times the normal rate, and have disproportionately produced patents and publications.
- Test preparation courses are minimally effective, mostly aiding the math component—for which pre-calculus math instruction is also beneficial.
- Household income better predicts applicants’ essay quality than does SAT scores. Thus shifting from SATs to other criteria such as essays can increase inequality of opportunity.
- Schools can still prioritize giving opportunity to all social groups and to enriching their campus with diversity. “Once we brought the test requirement back,” explained MIT admissions dean Stuart Schmill, “we admitted the most diverse class that we ever had in our history,” including 31 percent Black and Hispanic students.
There is, to be sure, much more to academic and vocational success than academic aptitude and general intelligence. Conscientiousness matters. Grit matters. Social skill matters. Curiosity matters. Creativity matters. Courage matters.
And aptitude matters. That is why the SAT serves a prosocial purpose when it enables identification of otherwise unnoticed talent. Such is the case of one West African student to whom I alerted my college—someone who, after earning near perfect SAT scores as a 16-year-old, is now excelling here in physics courses and research, and destined for a high-level STEM career.
One New Yorker letter writer—the daughter of a single, uneducated immigrant—explained that the SAT was her springboard to her state’s flagship university, “and, from there, on to medical school. Flawed thought it is, the SAT afforded me, as it has thousands of others, a way to prove that a poor, public-school kid who never had any test prep can do just as well as, if not better than, her better-off peers.”
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David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.
