Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions
FollowThis was a quite reasonable thing to do in 2020, when, through no fault of their own, many kids had difficulty taking the SAT or the ACT — their scheduled test was canceled, or they or someone they lived with was immunocompromised. But the colleges’ policies continued long after we had excellent vaccines, in part because those tests gave us a lot of very unwelcome information.
They told us, for example, that academic ability is unequally distributed. Some people are better at math, some people are better at English and some people aren’t terrific at either. And with that information came an even more painful fact: Many of those differences mirror other inequalities in our society, including the most pernicious ones. Very generally: Rich kids do better than poor kids. White and Asian kids do better than Black and Hispanic kids. On the math sections, boys perform better than girls.
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Despite decades of attempts to narrow those gaps, they’ve stubbornly refused to close. Eventually, people decided that the problem was the tests themselves. A sizeable cottage industry sprung up to provide critics with dubious research supposedly showing that the tests don’t predict college performance very well.
Demand for research suggesting tests don’t mean much was fueled by another uncomfortable fact: Test scores gave critics of affirmative action a way to quantify the boost (or detriment) various groups were getting in admissions. This problem became urgent as lawsuits filed by Students for Fair Admissions wended their way toward a Supreme Court that seemed eager to end affirmative action as we know it.
If the pandemic gave grateful admissions offices the excuse they needed to go test-optional, the court’s gutting of affirmative action gave them every reason to stay that way — or ditch the tests entirely. After the decision was handed down in June, I heard a lot of surprisingly glum conservatives predict that it wouldn’t matter, because colleges would just keep practicing affirmative action under another name, and vanishing test requirements would make it hard to draw the direct comparisons among groups that could unmask what admissions offices were doing.
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But MIT bucked the trend in 2022 by announcing its........