Wasn't that the original reason to implement standardized college admissions testing? To allow the academically excellent access to college no matter what their race, religion or economic background? Maybe the SAT and ACT do too good of job at that giving different results from what leftist college admissions offices want, therefore the measurement standards must be destroyed.
I would like to see the correlation statistics between scores and college success. Does a 1000 mean you are 50%likely to fail at a state university while a 1200 means you are 90% likely to succeed? And do those statistics hold across all races?
Those statistics are out there.
Anecdotally, I have a friend who works at a top US university. They have "scholarship" windows for "disadvantaged" kids, who otherwise have lower SAT scores. Their internal results have shown that most can't handle the academic work, especially in the fields that "sounded" cool when they entered - computer science, pre-med.
So they get angry, depressed, drop-out, or finish their degrees in another major like 'creative writing' or a social science
There are indeed such studies. They do show such correlations.
But they suffer from a couple of factors - the main one:
- Talent (grades and testing) sorts kids into different institutions. Within each institution there is a restricted range of talent. So the full range of kids who take the SAT is more or less chopped up into segments of the whole. One can be a star at Sacramento State while being totally unsuited for Cal Tech.
Highly successful kids at Sac State are likely to be way dumber than those who drop out of Cal Tech.
One effect of the tests is in fact to do this institutional sorting.
This undermines studies within institutions, as the restricted range of test scores within each does not give a good idea of the big picture.