THE RECENT MOVE to eliminate SAT scores from the pantheon of admission criteria for the University of California system has reignited a nationwide debate over the merits and failures of the (in)famous standardized test. However, in assessing the value of the SAT as a testing instrument and determining whether or not it is culturally biased, most of the arguments have focused on the inputs that lead up to the SAT, when the more fundamental issue has to do with the results that the SAT generates. How well does the test predict the life outcomes we care about for various groups? Only after answering this question does the question of bias come into focus.

Nobody has yet conducted the kind of pure social science experiment that would provide conclusive evidence on the matter. In such an experiment, we might randomly select fifty students that, by the criterion of SAT scores, should have been admitted to, say, Yale, Harvard, or Princeton and put these students in the reject pile, while taking fifty applications from the "meritocratic" reject pile and sending them letters of admission. We'd follow these kids and their classmates for fifteen years. If the kids who are falsely rejected go on to thrive anyway, then the SAT predicts something relevant about success and where one goes to school means little. By contrast, if the kids who were falsely admitted do end up realizing the promise of that Harvard degree, then the experiment tells us that the SAT does not count for much in life but a Harvard degree sure does. While we do not have such random assignment experiments to go by, we do have some evidence that points to the relative salience of the SAT as a predictor of success: affirmative action admittees and student athlete admittees, two groups that demonstrate lower average SAT scores than other categories of students at elite schools. They are akin to the fifty rejectees to whom we send acceptance letters. So how do they fare?

In The Shape of the River, authors William G. Bowen and Derek Bok demonstrate that minority students admitted with lower SAT scores than their non-minority counterparts go on to perform equally well as life marches on in a variety of contexts and measures ranging from professional achievement to community service and not as well in others, such as income. By contrast, student athletes, James Shulman and William G. Bowen tell us in The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, are admitted with the lowest average sat scores of all groups and perform worse than their higher-scoring, non-athlete counterparts in terms of educational outcomes but end up earning more money anyway. Of course, these data do not present us with an idea of what might happen to our hypothetical group of rejected high scorers -- though other research follows students who were accepted to elite schools but attended elsewhere for whatever reason and shows that they turn out the same as those that did attend. In other words, the results are mixed.

So whether or not the SAT is effective and/or culturally biased really depends on the larger labor market in which the educational institutions are situated. The legitimacy of the test rests in how well it predicts success in the social institutions into which students are channeled. It is the entire labor market that may be culturally biased -- rewarding the type of knowledge that the SAT tests. Unfortunately, since Princeton is worth something just for its name, a vicious cycle we'll call credentialism emerges. The SAT appears to be a relevant predictor since students who are admitted to the prestigious schools on its basis do well for the very fact that they were admitted to the prestigious schools. Again, the problem here is not the SAT per se, it is the credentialism inherent in our system.

The ultimate irony lies in the fact that the SAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, MCAT, and all the other standardized tests that millions of Americans take yearly are all -- at least ideally -- ways to tackle this credentialism issue. The SAT is supposed to give the kid who went to her local public school the chance -- on a level playing field -- to show that she is as "able" as the kid who went to an elite, private high school. In fact, that mission constitutes the original rationale behind the founding of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the SAT and other exams like it. Back in 1933, Harvard had sought to cast a wider net than the handful of elite private schools that had routinely funneled in most of its undergraduate population. The solution was to come up with a more "objective" standard, set by an institution external to the university itself. By 1943, with the co-optation of a Princeton psychologist’s exam, the SAT and ETS were immortally joined. The rest is history, a self-fulfilling and problematic history. Perhaps the most obvious solution is to keep the SAT in place and get rid of college.