Columbia University is the latest high-profile university to abandon the SAT. As these institutions always are, they’re cagey about why, couching everything in buzzwords and euphemism. But you can be sure that the most powerful force driving the widespread effort to drop the SAT is the insistence that the SAT is an engine of racial inequality. This has been the claim, again and again, that we need to drop the SAT because its results are racially stratified. As I’ve argued at length, the gaps in SAT results are actually smaller than people on social media like to claim (which is unsurprising because most of them have never read the relevant literature). But the movement to get rid of the SAT and replace it with greater emphasis on high school GPA marches on. What remains utterly bizarre about all of this is that high school GPA is racially stratified too! The correlations aren’t even particularly different from those in SAT data. It’s so utterly mindless; how can you justify replacing a metric because it’s racially stratified so that you can further emphasize a metric that’s also racially stratified?
As Sutton et al say, “Racial/ethnic minority students, boys, and especially black boys, receive lower grades than other groups… young black men are a highly marginalized racial/ethnic and gender subgroup throughout schooling.” This general condition is decades old. The ranking and gaps in high school are about the same as those observed on the SAT:
- Asian/Pacific Islander: 3.26
- White: 3.09
- Hispanic: 2.84
- Black: 2.69
If you’d like a visual, this is from the Nation’s Report Card, data pretty old at this point but as I said the underlying situation hasn’t changed much: