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If you’re a healthy, childless adult, it can be easy to forget one of the most exquisite ways in which things could always be worse: You could be applying to college.

With the pandemic disrupting testing dates, many schools across the country have made the SAT and ACT optional for this year’s applicants. And last week, the University of California system, which includes some of the nation’s best schools, went even further by voting to phase out the tests entirely by 2025.

The decision was in some ways a long time coming: For decades, the exams have been accused of being “extremely flawed and very unfair,” as a member of the California system’s governing board put it. But will eliminating the tests actually make the college admissions process fairer for disadvantaged students, or will what replaces them be even worse? Here’s what people are saying.

Why ‘unfair’?

The history of standardized tests is rooted in discrimination, as Endiya Griffin explains at TeenVogue. The SAT’s origins can be traced back to World War I, when a young psychologist by the name of Carl Brigham helped develop a mental aptitude test for the U.S. Army to screen recruits. Brigham, a Princeton professor and avid eugenicist, used the results to justify his belief in “the intellectual superiority of the Nordic race” and to warn against the “infiltration of white blood into the Negro.” In the 1920s, he adapted the test for college admissions.

Today, as my colleague Shawn Hubler notes, many critics of standardized tests continue to view them as racially and economically discriminatory in effect, if no longer in intent:

• In 2019, 55 percent of Asian-American test takers and 45 percent of white test takers scored 1200 or higher on the SAT. For Hispanic and black students, those numbers were 12 percent and 9 percent.

• SAT scores also correlate with income: In general, students from wealthier families — who tend to reap the benefits of better-funded schools and can pay thousands of dollars for private coaching and test prep — do better than those from lower-income ones. At poverty levels, the scoring disparity is twice as large for black students than for white ones. (And of course if you’re rich enough, you can simply try buying a better score, though results may vary.)

High school grades would be a fairer metric by which to evaluate students, the author Paul Tough argues in The Times. Compared with SAT scores, high school G.P.A.s don’t track nearly as strongly with family income or race, according to a recent study. Relying on grades would reward “strivers,” who have good grades but don’t perform as well on standardized tests, while penalizing “slackers,” who test well but don’t put much effort into school. “An impressive high school G.P.A. reflects a combination of innate talent and dedicated hard work, and that’s exactly what you need to excel in college,” he says.

And if the SAT and ACT were unfair before the pandemic, they’re probably even more so now, Linda K. Wertheimer writes for The Boston Globe. The companies behind both tests are planning to roll out online options, but many low-income students lack internet access, and cheating concerns abound.

Is the alternative worse?

Flawed as they are, standardized tests are still the least unfair metric of evaluating college applicants, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues in The Times. The SAT and ACT have plenty of issues, she admits, but grades may do even less to level the playing field because of how variable they are: Nearly half of high school students who graduated in 2016 had at least an A- average, but an admissions officer may give an A- from a struggling public school in Mississippi less weight than one from Phillips Academy, even though grade inflation is worse at wealthier and whiter schools. Other application components — personal essays, recommendation letters from illustrious mentors, calls from well-connected college counselors — also favor students from richer families.

“This is not a defense of the status quo, but rather a plea to deeply consider what colleges will weigh more heavily if they don’t consider standardized tests in their admissions decisions,” she writes. “Generalized, unfair distinctions, which are often a result of socioeconomic biases, can often be overcome by the counterweight of strong standardized test scores from students in public schools perceived as middling or underperforming.”

In fact, that’s exactly what the University of California system recently found, as The Los Angeles Times editorial board has pointed out. In February, a task force commissioned by the faculty senate to study the impact of standardized tests reported that they predict college success more effectively than high school grades or other measures and actually give a leg up to black, Latino and low-income students by offering an additional metric for admissions officers who might otherwise reject them. That report was unanimously endorsed by the university assembly last month.

“For now, UC should keep the test scores,” the Los Angeles Times editorial board argued after the report’s release. “Doing otherwise because of political or legal pressure or even personal beliefs would belie the very foundation of great universities, which pride themselves on open-minded inquiry and fact-based decision making.”

[Related: “California Defines Testing Down”]

A superficial solution?

Fixing standardized testing treats only the symptoms of educational inequality, wrote Andre M. Perry for Brookings last year. Its cause, he said, is the racial wealth gap, which stems from slavery, segregation, racism and economic exploitation, and would require much more ambitious policy efforts to close. “I’m all for acknowledging wealth disparities wherever we can, but policymakers and institutional leaders shouldn’t forget that programs that directly attempt to close the wealth gap will have more bearing on how students score on a standardized test,” he argued. “We should be trying to level the playing field by providing historically disenfranchised people opportunities to build wealth rather than retrofitting test results around inequality.”

Then again, if the United States were more egalitarian, it might not place so much weight on college admissions in the first place. The Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits has argued that the bigger flaw of America’s hypercompetitive college admissions process is not in the method of measuring merit but rather in the meritocratic ideal itself. Meritocracy, in his view, inevitably produces a “durable, self-sustaining hierarchy” that uses notions of worthiness to rationalize itself. If a low-income student sees getting into Harvard or Yale as one of the few avenues of socioeconomic mobility, it’s at least in some small part because places like Harvard and Yale exist.

“Meritocracy has created a competition that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win,” Mr. Markovits wrote in The Atlantic last year. Rather than perfecting the tests used to determine whether someone deserves a place among the elite, he suggests “building a society in which a good education and good jobs are available to a broader swath of people — so that reaching the very highest rungs of the ladder is simply less important.”

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at [email protected]. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.

MORE PERSPECTIVES ON COLLEGE ADMISSIONS TESTS

Students chime in on whether they should be required to take the SAT and ACT to apply to college. [The New York Times]

WHAT YOU’RE SAYING

Here’s what one reader had to say about the last edition: How long will it take for the economy to recover?

Marie from New Zealand: “One thing I have learned in this crisis is that for every expert opinion there is an equal and opposite expert opinion. That initially applied to medical opinions but now extends to include economic opinions. And could just about extend to every other contentious issue we face today (exception: does not include any Trump opinions because they don’t qualify as ‘expert’).””