Job application asked for my SAT scores

>Each applicant took the test under unknown conditions. You don't know [...] whether they walked in cold or worked with a tutor for months, or whether they came from a perfectly stable home life or found out the night before that their dog died/parents are getting divorced/worked the night shift at a grocery store to help pay rent. Maybe they struggled with addiction and rebellion in their youth.

I'm pretty sure this is (part of) what's being filtered for quite intentionally.

There are fee waivers for poor kids, and free test prep thanks to Khan Academy. These may not have existed decades ago, but they exist now.

There's a difference between not studying and just hand-waving away the SAT, which plays a huge role in things like college admittance. And the SAT isn't particularly hard, even back in the days when it was apparently significantly more challenging, for a clever kid. My prep was picking up some old book on it at Half Price Books and leaving it in the bathroom. Worked excellently!

"Equity" is still something of a euphemism - the specific reason that the UC Regents got rid of the SAT requirement is because the non-profit law firm Public Counsel, along with a consortium of other non-profits and activist organizations, sued the UC system ostensibly on behalf of several students; and the UC Regents ended up agreeing to a settlement where they would not use SAT or ACT scores for admissions until after 2025. Public Counsel brags about the details of the lawsuit on their website (https://publiccounsel.org/our-cases/smith-v-regents-of-unive...):

> For decades, the University of California’s use of discriminatory SAT and ACT scores deprived hundreds of thousands of well-qualified students of color, students from low-income families, and students with disabilities of the opportunity to pursue higher education in the nation’s preeminent public university system. Rather than provide meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed in college, SAT and ACT scores act as stand-ins for students’ wealth and race, and thus advantage more privileged applicants. Even University leaders admit that the tests are “racist” and “correlated to wealth and privilege.”

> Public Counsel and co-counsel brought this lawsuit on behalf of students and community organizations—Chinese for Affirmative Action, College Access Plan, College Seekers, Community Coalition, Dolores Huerta Foundation, and Little Manila Rising—challenging the University of California’s use of the SAT and ACT as discriminatory on the bases of race, wealth, and disability. In August 2020, Plaintiffs obtained a preliminary injunction requiring the University to immediately stop using the tests for undergraduate admissions and scholarship determinations. Plaintiffs then defeated the University’s attempts to prevent the injunction from taking effect. In the admissions cycle following the injunction, UC saw record gains in numbers of Black and Latinx students applying to and gaining admission to its campus.

Public Counsel is pretty clear that the legal theory they were originally operating under is that requiring SAT and ACT scores for university admission is racially discriminatory, and the specific races it's discriminatory against are the groups they characterize as "students of color", which we can take to mean primarily black and Latino students because they specifically mention the detail "In the admissions cycle following the injunction, UC saw record gains in numbers of Black and Latinx students applying to and gaining admission to its campus.".

Interestingly, the lawsuit was originally brought forward in late 2019, before the start of the COVID pandemic. The temporary injunction against using the SAT/ACT was imposed in August 2020, well into the pandemic, on the grounds that the pandemic conditions made it more difficult for applicants with disabilities to take standardized tests, in a way that was plausibly legally discriminatory - but of course this couldn't have been the primary legal justification that Public Counsel used when the brought the lawsuit in 2019, unless they were prescient enough to have predicted the course of the pandemic at that time (in my memory, the number of people in the Anglosphere who were paying attention to COVID-related news in China before the turn of 2020 and thought that it might develop into a concerning pandemic was incredibly small).

The settlement that the UC Regents reached in May 2021 lasted until Spring 2025, so it's only now that it's legally possible for the UC Regents to reconsider the ban on using the SAT/ACT for admissions. Presumably, Public Counsel and the other activist groups - Chinese for Affirmative Action, College Access Plan, College Seekers, Community Coalition, Dolores Huerta Foundation, and Little Manila Rising - haven't changed their opinion that the use of the SAT/ACT is racially discriminatory towards blacks and latinos. But they don't seem to have raised another lawsuit about this, perhaps because the political environment in the US has changed since 2020 in ways that make them less optimistic about their chances of success.

My wife and I are perfect poster children for demonstrating the danger in making the assumption that tests are an accurate assessment of someone's mastery of material.

My wife has anxiety, and the time-limited, high-stakes, pass-or-fail nature of a test makes it much, much harder for her to perform well. Outside that context, she's blazingly intelligent, performs very well under real-world high-pressure situations, is extremely diligent at getting any other assigned work done well on time, and has repeatedly written the guidelines for processes and procedures in her jobs.

I'm the opposite in many ways. I generally do somewhat poorly in a classic classroom environment, primarily due to ADHD hampering my ability to get homework done regularly and on time. However, I test amazingly well. I consistently finish in 50-70% of the time of other students, with scores in the high 90% range. (In my jobs, I think I do pretty well.)

Naturally the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but I've known enough other people who fit both of our molds that I think it's fair to say that basing even a plurality of your assessment of someone purely on tests, especially standardised tests, is going to mislead you at least as often as not, in both directions.