(I’m not making that argument myself, I haven’t seen numbers explained well enough to form a solid opinion)
The problem is that this argument is in isolation. If SAT is a proxy, how much better are the other activities as proxies? Who has the leisure to participate all those sports clubs, volunteer clubs, writing all kinds of fancy essays? While the poor kids struggle with jobs outside the school work to support the family and are perpetual tired? If u get rid of the SAT score, who are supporting these poor kids?
I don't believe the people who is making the argument didn't know this. I firmly believe that they are bad faithed and hope others can't see through the crack of the logic and eat it up. Who benefit from this kind of policy which favors the kids with 'life fulfilling' resumes? Plus AA, you know fully well who are benefiting (hint, not the poor kids).
GPA: Schools weigh GPA differently. One thing I saw was that some schools with honors / AP you can get above a 4.0 to the point of a 5/4. Also GPA can be messed up when someone has a bad home life, or works a job.
honors/ap/ib: These are often related to which school you go to. Poor schools have few to no AP classes available. My school had 2 AP courses available, 0 IB. I was shocked when I went to college and talked to people that had 10 or 20 AP classes. Sure anyone can just take the AP exam, but I didn't know that at the time.
Extracurriculars: Bad and poor schools have fewer extracurriculars.
When you compare good schools (which are in wealthier more exclusive neighborhoods) with bad schools, not even accounting for private schools, its absolutely astounding the differences.
Which raises the question: why single out the SAT?
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
SAT is a rugged system that performs well while withstanding concerted efforts by hackers to undermine it. Replacing it with systems that perform no better (when not under anywhere near as much fire, and appearing to have no real security) is probably not going to work so well.
The handful of kids (including me) that didn't pay 5 digits for fancy SAT prep at my school poured over some study guides and watched pirated VCDs and ended up doing better than kids who half hearted their private prep.
I don't know otherwise, but that seems unlikely to me, so I'm interested if you have any evidence that poor kids pass these exams at the same rate.
With a harder test like the JEE, we can separate these two outcomes
On the negative side, we also have reservations depending on your caste, so whether or not you get admission into a prestigious institute depends on your family history.
Some will do, for sure. However, when tests are challenging enough, teachers and talent become dominating factors. Good teachers make sure that students work hard and have access to illuminating exercises to realize their full potential, and students with insufficient talent will not excel in those tests no matter how much tutoring they have. After all, tutoring is not education. Of course, I may have been biased per my own observation: the distribution of student performance in my schools hardly changed due to tutoring because my teachers simply gave challenging enough homework and exams, which did a good enough job to remove the advantages of tutoring, if there's any. Using an extreme example: yes you can find the best coach for you to prepare Math Olympiad, but you'd be able to cross a threshold first before you can even understand what the coach talks about. Similarly on the level of JEE or national entrance exams, I may spend 10 times as much time memorizing some patterns while my classmates whoop my ass by simply attending classes -- this is also why I think the progressives are doing a deservice to poor kids or minority groups. They could've raise standards and build better public schools to help the talented stand out, yet they choose to lower standards and really damage the perception on the otherwise truly talented group.
It's no better than each of these, but it improves the prediction when combined with them.
But worse, those other things: GPA, AP course participation, impressive extracurriculars--- are far more receptive to being "bought" than a good SAT score. Being on a travel sports team, or having leisure / advice to do "impressive" volunteering, or having systemic tutoring support... do much more to move these other metrics than you can move SAT with any amount of prep.
If it were a proxy for socio-economic status, there would have to be some way for the score to adjust if the student's parents suddenly went broke.
Since there isn't it cannot be a proxy.
Perhaps you meant it correlates? So what? What if it correlates better with success in college than pure socioeconomic status, which I'm fairly sure it does?
Should we just use the less accurate one instead?