I am too remote from this system to have strong opinions but I also heard all the princelings are doing great at those exams!

The problem with any standardized test is that it can be gamed with enough practice/resources that poor people are way less likely to be able to access. So it's not a cure-all, there are tradeoffs.

Standardized tests are the least game-able metric. In NYC poor Chinese immigrants manage to scrounge together $900 for an SAT prep class. It is much harder for them to figure out what some white college administrator wants to hear in a diversity essay. Or to get a job at some non-profit in China working on some social justice effort appealing to white college administrators.

Standardized testing isn’t perfectly meritocratic, but everything else is worse.

Absolutely. The cost of SAT prep courses are very small in comparison to the immeasurable cost of a lifetime of culture and experience that are necessary to impress an admissions board during an essay or interview. This is why it’s so absolutely disgusting to me to find that schools tended to rate Asian students so low on “personality scores”.

As a side note, I haven’t found any more detailed breakdown of the personality scoring results. Asia is a very diverse place and Asian ethnic groups in the US range from the very richest to some of the poorest.

Standardized tests are an imperfect metric. The fact that they’re imperfect doesn’t make all metrics equivalent.

For example, Harvard could simply auction off their seats. That’s transparent at least, if not exactly fair.

But it is still the fairest option we have. Any other metric is usually much more gameable. Be it sports, essay writing, extra curriculars, volunteering?!?!? and so on.

Or maybe alternative is truly random or negative wealth scoring. That is only the poorest students get entry and everyone else will have to figure out something else.