Does anyone else feel that standardized tests are the most egalitarian and meritocratic metric in the admissions process? Removing them and claiming that it makes things fairer doesn't seem true to me.
The other three metrics (essay, grades, letters of recommendation) can be gamed/cheated. I'm sure standardized testing cheating happens, but it's so much more difficult, even for someone with connections.
Your grades are positively affected if your family can afford tutors for you, or if your parents are educated enough to tutor you themselves. You can have inflated grades that aren't reflective of your actual competency or knowledge. The inverse of this is also true. Bad grades don't provide any obvious information or signal on their own. Poorer students may be assigned to schools that don't have AP classes, so they don't even have the possibility of grade inflation.
You can have people help you write your admissions essay. Hell, you can have other people write it for you altogether. All of the wealth factors that influence GPA also influence your essay, if you actually write it completely by yourself.
Letters of recommendation seem to be the most exclusionary and biased of all. I actually think it's ridiculous that they're still allowed. There is no way to verify that they are true. They're grounded in connections and elitism. How is the average applicant even supposed to compete with letters from a politician, alumni, famous businessperson, or some other type of celebrity? A wealthy student's family can also pay for these in multiple ways, if, for some reason, the connections didn't already exist.
Meanwhile, the argument for tests being biased is that wealthier kids are able to prepare for them more than kids with less resources. But all of the other metrics tie to wealth as well, and every argument against standardized tests also applies to GPA. I'd even say GPA is influenced by wealth more than tests.
You can pirate expensive prep materials. You can PROBABLY find a volunteer tutor if you live in or near a college. But even taking the argument that wealthier children are at an advantage at full value, that advantage is still less than what is provided by the other 3 metrics.
I'm taking this a bit personally since I had an incredibly bad GPA in junior high and high school. I hated doing homework, and I hated sitting in lectures. I failed multiple classes because homework and attendance counted for so much of the total grade, that even 100%ing every quiz and test would still give me less than 60% in the class. The only thing that proved that I wasn't mentally retarded was my performance in course tests and standardized tests.
College went ok. I'm now doing better career-wise and financially than anyone I went to school with, including all of the IB kids who went to top-tier schools (with one exception, there's ONE other person on my level, because they went into finance and they're now an iBanker). I would have been completely screwed without standardized tests as a metric.