The SAT works for its intended purpose — predicting success in college. This isn’t to say that the SAT is perfect. You can probably think of someone who did poorly on the SAT and yet graduated summa cum laude from college. You can probably also think of someone who did spectacularly well on the SAT but who flunked out of college after a semester. Many factors not captured by the SAT — like personality, motivation and discipline — contribute to success in college. But, relatively speaking, the SAT works well.

The SAT captures more than a narrow range of skills, important only in the first year or two of college. Large-scale meta-analyses by researchers at the University of Minnesota have found that SAT performance is as good of a predictor of overall college grade point average as it is of freshman grade point average, and Vanderbilt researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow have documented that the SAT predicts life outcomes well beyond the college years, including income and occupational achievements.

Furthermore, the SAT is largely a measure of general intelligence. Scores on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on standardized tests of intelligence, and like IQ scores, are stable across time and not easily increased through training, coaching or practice. SAT preparation courses appear to work, but the gains are small — on average, no more than about 20 points per section.

This debate is ultimately about intelligence and its modifiability — and the question of whether it is fair to use people’s scores on what is essentially an intelligence test to make decisions that profoundly affect their lives. If that makes us all uncomfortable, that’s just too bad.

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