> However it has been my experience that whenever an explicit test or hierarchy is removed another shadow one builds up that is more subjective, more biased, an

> However it has been my experience that whenever an explicit test or hierarchy is removed another shadow one builds up that is more subjective, more biased, and more subject to abuse. Many people seem to take as given that college admissions should be about "objectively" choosing the most deserving students academically and/or extracurricularly. That is not a complete picture. At the top schools, there's a big focus on constructing an incoming class with students that are likely to succeed both in college and post-college, such that the class is likely to include future stars in law, medicine, business, academia, etc., likely to be able to contribute money or prestige to the institution in 20 years -- these correlate with high school academic performance, for sure, but they also correlate with who your parents are, what types of activities you choose to engage in, your internal initiative and knowledge of yourself, etc. Of course, there's no way to know all this in advance, so admissions officers use a very noisy process to try to guess. That the SAT is game-able with money makes it a less useful indicator, because it starts to correlate with wealth rather than academic ability. Wealth already has plenty of proxies that are visible in the application file, so having another indicator of it is not super helpful. > it also meant that if I didn't have a private tutor if I could get a perfect score my chances increase Sure, if admissions officers ignore everything else they know about you -- which they don't!