By Myles Pitts, Stentorian Staff Writer
It’s August—the beginning of fall semester of your senior year–prime time for college application season. As you toil over categorically organizing the entirety of your childhood through one medium (the common app in tandem with college-specific supplementals), you realize you’ve left out one critical piece of seeming importance to most top colleges: the SAT.
Hurriedly, you sign up for the next available date and begin studying for the assessment as if it solely evinces colleges of your aptitude for learning. After taking the SAT for the first time, you realize that you are far off from the ridiculously inflated SAT scores that define the score ranges of most of the top 20 colleges. Even just getting a flat 1500 would place you out of the score range at some of the top colleges even though it means you’ve only gotten a few questions incorrect. You pay for examination after examination, hoping to improve your score before application season is finalized in January.
Does this sound familiar? Unfortunately, it is the reality of the college process for many high school students at NCSSM and beyond. The SAT is an unfortunate point of stress for many students while they apply to college as the prevailing sentiment within America is that the test is a mainstay of how colleges evaluate one’s affinity for learning.
According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 39 percent of Americans say standardized testing should be used as a major factor in college admissions, followed by 46 percent who believe that it should at least be a minor factor in admissions. Meaning, the majority of the population still places an emphasis on standardized testing despite the preponderance of troubles associated with it.
To place the foundations of the contemporary version of the SAT within its historical context requires an understanding of its creator. In 1923, the man who spearheaded the SAT’s creation was Dr. Carl Brigham, a known eugenicist who believed that the white race was intellectually superior to all other races. Brigham was instrumental in developing aptitude tests for the US army during WW1. After being commissioned by the College Board (yes, the same college board from today), he made the “Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)” to measure what he deemed to be the intrinsic intellectual abilities of its test takers.
Standardized psychological evaluations like Brigham’s were first implemented in the army to segregate units based on their test scores; African-Americans often had lower test scores which therefore placed them in lower positions within the armed forces. But the SAT did not prove Brigham’s theory that Black Americans were intellectually inferior (although this is likely what he understood the difference in test scores to mean). Rather, it demonstrated the economic inequalities that plagued minority communities in comparison to their white counterparts.
Though the SAT is screened thoroughly to remove any biases that may be present within its format, Black and Latinx Test takers still perform worse than their white counterparts. In fact, White students are two to three times more likely to score within the 1400-1600 range than their Black and Latinx counterparts.
A similar story can be told when examining the difference in financial circumstances of test-takers: Students with a family income over 100K+ are twice as likely than families who make under 50k to have combined test scores of 1400-1600. There is even a gender gap: Male students are 42% more likely to have combined SAT scores in the 1400-1600 range.
Most experts agree that this divide originates from a multitude of factors: The racial differences can be primarily explained through the fact that minority communities often lack the resources to prepare students for tests, or even lack the ability to pay for the test itself. They also usually cannot afford private tutors or other SAT classes to help prepare students for the tests, placing them at a disadvantage behind their white counterparts who on average have better financial circumstances.
The same types of discrepancies explain the differences in SAT scores dependent on financial status as well. As for the gender gap in SAT scores, it can primarily be explained by differences in math scores; girls often perform worse than boys in math throughout K-12 (not due to intrinsic ability, but rather, societies apprehension to encourage women and girls to be “good at math” because it is seen as a male-associated subject) and the SAT is yet another example of this fact.
Since prestigious schools often value high SAT scores, it disproportionately affects minority enrollment within these institutions by devaluing their applications competitiveness, especially after the recent gutting of affirmative action in college admissions.
These underlying issues make it clear: The SAT cannot be a fair measure of intellect when race and class remain stronger predictors of performance than ability itself. The test does not reveal who is smartest—it reveals who has had the most resources, time, and access.
True equity in education cannot exist as long as opportunity is measured with a ruler shaped by privilege. If colleges claim to seek potential, creativity, and resilience, then clinging to the SAT is no longer tradition—it is a contradiction. Fair admissions will never come from equal testing alone, but from equal opportunity.
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