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Walter Kirn attacks the SAT and those who make it their lodestar:
I call this group of contemporary strivers -- a group that has largely supplanted the moneyed gentry as our country's governing class -- the "Aptocrats," after the primary trait that we were tested for and which we sought to develop in ourselves as a means of passing those tests. As defined by the institutions responsible for spotting and training America's brightest youth, this "aptitude" is a curious quality. It doesn't reflect the knowledge in your head, let alone the wisdom in your soul, but some quotient of promise and raw mental agility thought to be crucial to academic success and, by extension, success in general. All of this makes for a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more aptitude that a young person displays, the more likely it is that she or he will have a chance to win the golden tickets -- fine diplomas, elite appointments and so on -- that permit you to lead the aptocratic establishment and set the terms by which it operates.The SAT is a significant factor in admissions to the most selective colleges in America. But the author assumes something more -- that one's score on the SAT determines success not only in college admissions, but in life. Is this true? What would one find upon surveying America's political, business and cultural leaders? Are they the same folks who scored highest on the SATs, or does admission to a highly selective college actually matter less to future success than Mr. Kirn seems to assume?
I suspect that a high score on the SAT isn't a self-fulfilling prophecy of success -- it seems to me that many high scorers would've been fine regardless of what college they attended, and that plenty of highly successful folks didn't care that much about the SAT or the uber-selectivity of their college. Certain fields privilege this sort of pedigree, but they seem to me the exception rather than the rule.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't do a better job recognizing promising aptitudes other than those measured by the SAT, but it isn't as though there's a good test for the knowledge in your head or the wisdom in your soul. Should a reliable way to measure those things arise, I'm sure that metric will be used too.
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