According to Kaplan, the debate has largely been framed as a tug-of-war between fairness and merit. Those who favor requiring the SAT contend that standardized testing offers a reliable, objective gauge of academic readiness. Critics counter that the exam puts students from lower-income and historically underrepresented communities at a disadvantage. Kaplan believes both camps have legitimate points — but he argues they’re focused on the wrong issue entirely.

The real reason universities keep circling back to the SAT, he says, is that almost every other piece of the admissions puzzle has lost its usefulness as a way to tell applicants apart. Decades ago, a perfect grade point average meant something rare — often signaling the top student in a graduating class. Now, thanks to grade inflation and the spread of weighted grading systems, near-perfect GPAs are common among applicants to the nation’s top universities.

Letters of recommendation have followed a similar path, rarely including any hint of criticism, which leaves admissions officers hunting for small details to differentiate between candidates who all look outstanding on paper. Personal essays, once a window into an applicant’s voice and character, have also lost credibility. With artificial intelligence tools capable of producing polished writing instantly — and with many students receiving extensive help from teachers, counselors or paid consultants — it’s increasingly difficult to know whose words are truly their own.

The end result, Kaplan writes, is an applicant pool where virtually everyone looks exceptional.

Grade inflation doesn’t stop once students get to campus, either. During the 2024-25 academic year, 84% of the grades awarded at Harvard were A’s or A-minuses, compared to just 24% two decades earlier. Reports suggest the same pattern has taken hold at other elite institutions, including UC Berkeley. When nearly every student earns top marks, those grades stop carrying much meaning.

That’s part of why the SAT has retained outsized influence in the admissions process — it remains one of the few tools that still produces a clear range of results. Supporters of the exam point out that it predicts college performance fairly consistently across different racial and ethnic groups, and argue that makes it an unbiased measure. But Kaplan says that argument sidesteps a bigger concern: average SAT scores vary significantly by race, ethnicity and income level, largely because of unequal access to strong schools, family resources and parental education. Giving the test more weight in admissions decisions, he warns, will inevitably reshape who gets in — and not necessarily for the better.

That concern carries extra weight for public universities like the UC system, especially now that political pressure and Supreme Court rulings have curtailed efforts to promote diversity on campus. Kaplan notes that Californians across the income spectrum help fund the UC system through their taxes, and an admissions process that increasingly rewards students with the most educational advantages threatens to undercut the university’s role as an engine of opportunity and upward mobility.

Beyond questions of access, Kaplan argues there’s an educational cost to losing diversity on campus. Students benefit from studying alongside classmates with different backgrounds, cultures and life experiences — exposure that sharpens critical thinking and helps prepare future leaders for an increasingly diverse workforce and society.

Rather than simply reinstating or permanently abandoning the SAT, Kaplan suggests the UC system needs to repair the credibility of the rest of its admissions process. That means confronting grade inflation head-on, pushing for more honest recommendation letters, rethinking how written work is evaluated in an era of AI-assisted writing, and developing better tools to measure traits like creativity, resilience and intellectual curiosity.

He also points to a deeper structural issue: California’s educational pipeline. A recent report from UC San Diego found that a significant number of incoming students are not adequately prepared for college-level math. Making the SAT more central to admissions decisions won’t fix that gap, Kaplan argues. The real fix lies in improving math instruction in high schools and better aligning it with what students need to succeed once they arrive on campus.

Ultimately, Kaplan frames the regents’ upcoming decision as being about far more than whether to bring back a single standardized test. The bigger task, he says, is building an admissions system where no single measure — the SAT included — carries more weight than it truly deserves.

Original source: CalMatters

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