AUGUST 21, 2007, 10:53 AM

Death to the SAT

By TOBIN HARSHAW

The controversial social scholar Charles Murray, writing at The American magazine's site, feels it's time to abandon the SAT test. His complaints aren't totally new: "The image of the SAT has done a 180-degree turn. No longer seen as a compensating resource for the unprivileged, it has become a corrosive symbol of privilege. 'Back when kids just got a good night's sleep and took the SAT, it was a leveler that helped you find the diamond in the rough,' Lawrence University's dean of admissions told The New York Times recently. 'Now that most of the great scores are affluent kids with lots of preparation, it just increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots.'"

More interestingly, Murray sees the test as being about more than just getting into a good college:

The final benefit of getting rid of the SAT is the hardest to describe but is probably the most important. By getting rid of the SAT, we would be getting rid of a totem for members of the cognitive elite. People forget achievement test scores. They do not forget cognitive test scores. The only cognitive test score that millions of people know about themselves is the SAT score. If the score is high, it is seen as proof that one is smart. If the score is not high, it is evidence of intellectual mediocrity or worse. Furthermore, it is evidence that cannot be explained away as a bad grade can be explained away. All who enter an SAT testing hall feel judged by their scores.

Worse yet, there are few other kinds of scores to counterbalance the SAT. Of the many talents and virtues that people possess, we have good measures for quantifying few besides athletic and intellectual ability. Falling short in athletic ability can be painful, especially for boys, but the domain of sports is confined. Intellectual ability has no such limits, and the implications of the SAT score spill far too widely. The 17-year-old who is at the 40th percentile on the SAT has no other score that lets him say to himself, "Yes, but I'm at the 99th percentile in working with my hands," or "Yes, but I'm at the 99th percentile for courage in the face of adversity."

Conversely, it seems to make no difference that high intellectual ability is a gift for which its recipients should be humbly grateful. Far too many students see a high score on the SAT as an expression of their own merit, not an achievement underwritten by the dumb luck of birth.

Hence the final reason for getting rid of the SAT: knowing those scores is too dispiriting for those who do poorly and too inspiriting for those who do well. In an age when intellectual talent is increasingly concentrated among young people who are also privileged economically and socially, the last thing we need are numbers that give these very, very lucky kids a sense of entitlement.