The SAT is administered by a private "not-for-profit" corporation (College Board) and doesn't test anything like history or science that most schools try to teach kids (well, probably all schools have a requirement). And every time someone wants to put together a national test as a replacement, it gets shot down (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not good reasons).
I did AP all four years of high school because I found the normal classes too boring, and my GPA probably would've been higher if I hadn't, but I got into college.
It's a convenient way to compare students from different schools. The per school graduation exams have the benefit of allowing customization on a per school (per class, even) basis. This customization is one of the good things about the US education system, IMO. We are not like Germany, with the track set for the student (Gymnasium vs trade school) at middle school age, nor are we like India, China, and Japan (single extremely high stakes test).
US schooling is uneven. Some of the schools are very good (well funded private, religious schools with a focus on schooling instead of dogma, public schools in wealthy areas). Some are terrible (public schools in poor areas, public schools in cities).
Standardized testing, when viewed from one angle, makes the world more even: the test "doesn't care" (debated) what race you are, the wealth of your parents, etc. It "objectively" (debated) measures aptitude, giving equal opportunity to all.
I'm fairly sympathetic to that view, and I'm also skeptical that removing the standardized testing requirements will lead to more equality. Standardized testing seems like the method least susceptible to rigging by rich parents, what will they replace it with that is fairer?
So how do people fail to graduate high-school?
If the bar sounds low and subjective, that’s because it often is, and as such I think it’s mostly useless for colleges looking to measure students against each other to choose who to admit.
Most public High Schools in the US are honestly extremely hard to fail out of. As long as you get C's in all your classes you'll graduate.
* Graded homework
* Papers/Project/Labs
* Midterm/Final Exam
The teacher chooses the exact mix per class, so it's possible you fail even if you ace the exams, or pass even if you fail the exams. This variability is why the standardized tests exist.
The exact weightings are not known to the students applying, but it's safe to say you can't just minmax on the standardized test.
I don't know if you've picked up the tone of some of the other comments in this thread, but people feel very strongly about what factors should be considered in college admissions. Almost no people will defend legacy admissions, few will defend athletic admissions, some will defend musicians, many will defend GPA and standardized testing.
College admissions are zero sum, and different weightings benefit one group over another. For example, "Asians" (the US does not differentiate South Asian [India, etc] from East Asians [China, Korea, Japan]) have very high test scores in the US. If you base your college admissions just on taking the people with the highest test scores, you would get a massive over-representation of Asians. Schools have decided that isn't what they want, so they take people with worse test scores in order to "balance" the student population.
This infuriates the people passed over in the name of "balance", naturally.
The standards for graduation across schools are massively different and the SAT/ACT is a private “solution” to the problem of measuring students across regions, for college admissions.
Nor do other schools...?
The SAT is also a thinly disguised IQ test, so it serves a different purpose anyway compared to high school grade records.
A lot of people have strong feelings against the SAT, but I actually think it's somewhat egalitarian. Before the SAT, prestigious colleges would only recruit from well-known feeder high schools whose curriculum was known to be rigorous. Since there is no unifying national curriculum, something like it is necessary so students from worse high-schools have a shot at getting into the nicer universities.
Of course, the effect of eliminating SAT/ACT could mean that other factors (like social connections, reported grades like your high school graduation test, etc) will end up being more heavily relied upon, and these could possibly be easier to rig or be more dependent on a wealthy family. Hard to tell, but the play dough squishes out somewhere, right?
The final exams High School seniors take are dependent on the curriculum they have chosen and are written/defined by their teachers. The outcome of these tests is reflected in the student's course grades and is reflected in their GPA (Grade Point Average) for their entire High School career.
The SAT or ACT are only used for College/University applications.
we didn't have any "graduation exams" as many other countries do - just needed to pass the required courses to gain the high school diploma. Our state testing exams were mainly to address progress, as the Exit Exam was suspended in 2015.
Even if we had these graduation exams, they also may vary depending on school, district, and state.