The dismay here is not due to a believe that testing correctly plucks the best minuscule number of deserving applicants that get in. It’s that everything else that is used is worse.
I find it to be extremely destructive to spend all your time complaining about problems, and none finding solutions. That’s more or less what Maxism is: a long list of faults with capitalism and a half-baked untested idea of what could maybe be a solution. And we’ve seen the damage that ideology has done.
Maybe instead of lowering standards, we should push kids to practice.
You just stated a very objective and valuable thing: they benefit people who practice. And it turns out that the will to practice doing things you don't know how to do is the most important skill you can have in life.
You can say that about GPA too.
Sure, as long as they have the free time to devote to that (which they may not, if they have to work through high school). Alternatively, they can hire an (expensive) tutor, which can help.
If scores are an important factor for admission, then that selects for people who:
* are good at standardized testing
* or, have the extra time and/or money to improve their score
There are, of course, many other things at play here; but it's a start!
In the late 1990s I practiced and bumped my score up about 100 points. Do I think it made a difference to the college I went to? Doubtful.
I think the better question is: Do the tests accurately predict if a student will do well in college? That's their point, and if schools have better ways to predict if an applicant will succeed, there's no point in using the test.