The Importance of Merit-Based Admissions

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the vast majority of colleges and universities waived the requirement that prospective students submit scores from the SAT and/or ACT. This was justified at the time, as K-12 schools across the country closed en masse in the spring of 2020 and struggled to stay open the following school year. But even as schools have fully reopened and pandemic safety protocols have ended, thousands of colleges and universities still have test-optional policies. Many of them have made such policies permanent.?

In general, proponents for removing standardized testing as a condition of college acceptance argue that it will foster equal opportunity on campus, increasing the ranks of people of color and applicants from lower income households. They are probably maintaining these policies in anticipation of a Supreme Court decision that will abolish affirmative action in higher education, sensing that by shifting permanently to test-optional they will be able to admit the students they want without public scrutiny from those who were rejected, while maintaining their elite status.?

Yet there is no evidence that doing away with the SATs and ACTs will improve racial or socioeconomic diversity on campus. In fact, absent objective and uniform criteria like standardized testing, admissions counselors will rely on subjective criteria to determine who is accepted and who is not. For the elite colleges and universities, this means the children of alumni, the rich, and those with lots of connections. Many of these people are white. For others, this will mean reliance on grade point averages, which are often inflated due to the desire of public schools to pass their pupils, lest they be reprimanded by the government, or it could mean written or verbal recommendations.?

This shift away from standardized testing has also extended into postgraduate studies. An arm of the American Bar Association, which accredits law schools across the country, recently voted to discourage such schools from requiring prospective students take the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) as a condition of application acceptance.?

There is benefit in setting aside a portion of admissions decisions based on the results of standardized testing, as such results are the same throughout the entire country. It allows schools to cut through the weeds of the wildly different grading policies and curricula across the nearly 14,000 school districts in the United States. Ditto for the nearly 3,000 four-year public colleges and universities. For the price of a prep book, any high school student in America, regardless of their race, their creed, or their parents’ financial condition, can use an excellent score on the SAT to propel past the wealthy and influential. Ditto for any college student taking the MCAT or LSAT.?

Thus, one can make the argument that standardized tests are in fact an equalizer and could enable people of marginalized backgrounds to enter high-standard professions. For example, a 24 year old who lives in an apartment in Brooklyn who had to work at a bodega shop to pay for his undergraduate education CUNY, if he studies hard and scores high on the LSAT, can be just as likely to get accepted into a prestigious law school as a 22 year old who lives in Lloyd Harbor, had his millionaire parents pay for his undergraduate studies at Colgate University, and scores mediocrely on the LSAT.?

Grade point averages today, even at the most prestigious colleges, cannot come close to predicting success in law school. Yours truly can attest to this. Law school is difficult, even so at Touro in Central Islip, New York. It is difficult because law school students undertake a professional education, a comprehensive and time-consuming approach to study and mastery in a competitive environment. It requires you to conform to stratified governing standards that are far more complex than anything in high school or college. This is done because law students use their degrees to get jobs in a profession critical to constitutional self-governance, only the best can be accepted.?

No one likes taking standardized tests, and such tests are not a fool-proof indicator of success; nor should standardized tests be the sole or even the dominant factor in determining admission to colleges and universities. But they have value. America needs competent and able professionals to render justice, defend our freedoms, heal the sick, and so on. Experiences in other countries that do not share our values, where power is won through connections and loyalty, not hard work, should serve as a pertinent warning (think for example, the struggles in China and their commitment to zero-COVID, which is explained in part by their refusal to use western-made vaccines, based solely on geopolitical and ideological concerns). Only through a rigorous, merit-based education can America have the most excellent doctors and lawyers, and the most prosperous future.