In addition, standardised tests do not have any bias about your past or about your education. Anyone can start from scratch, prepare and ace them. All other forms of admissions, GPA, essays etc have biases of other parties. Essays and recommendation letters especially. Also they are so easy to game.
They should clearly eliminate the test fees and make free prep material available for those who can't afford them. Conduct free preparation classes for anyone to attend etc. A lot can be done to make standardised tests more accessible. That would serve a greater purpose.
The University of California is eliminating them because scores are correlated to race.
Ironically, they used to have a set number of seats for people that had bad grades and aced the standardized tests. Blacks, Hispanics and other economically disadvantaged groups were over represented in that admissions pool. (So eliminating the tests will reduce the number of minority kids. According to the WSJ, they did this in Virginia in an attempt to boost enrollment in those groups. UC claimed that was their goal, but the study that they commissioned specifically to evaluate the policy change said it would reduce minority admissions.)
Doubly-ironically, a while back, California colleges had explicit quotas for Asian kids to keep them from "taking over". They eliminated the quotas and promised to never do it again.
They're still making a big stink about how the student body isn't representative enough. Guess which group is the only overrepresented one in California. (Hint: It's not the Caucasians.)
The structural racism in this state continues to amaze me.
They should clearly eliminate the test fees and make free prep material available for those who can't afford them. Conduct free preparation classes for anyone to attend etc. A lot can be done to make standardised tests more accessible. That would serve a greater purpose.