The bloodbath of American standardized testing has existed for generations, persisting as one of the country’s foremost factors in determining college admissions and a root of immense stress for many students. 

The SAT and ACT serve a single purpose: a national measure of academic capability through a single, two-to-four hour-long examination. It rarely reflects a person’s intelligence and is more just a competition to see who is better at taking one specific test. Because of this inherent unfairness to a certain skill set and the advantage it gives to more affluent families (the ability to afford more tests and hire tutors) makes the SAT an unreliable way to measure potential, and recently, colleges have turned to a more inclusive approach by allowing students to opt in to apply “test-optional.” 

But despite this, many colleges have recently opted out of this program to return to their original roots of requiring test scores. It varies from school to school, but the biggest reason is that it removes a standardized scale that colleges and universities can use to measure students from different schools and backgrounds. For example, how would a perfect GPA in a private school be compared with a perfect GPA in a public school? 

Although the SAT is an unreliable measure of a student’s intelligence and potential, to colleges, it is one of the most valuable, as it at least gives them some metric to comparing students in a nationally large pool of applicants.