I took the SAT decades ago, so the predictive nature of the SAT may have changed since — but I doubt that it has changed that much.

At that time, the SAT was good at predicting the likely performance of a prospective college student … for one term. That’s it. I got an excellent score on my SAT (not a perfect score, but I thought that it was a bullshit measure — which, like all standardized testing, it is — so I didn’t care). I did well in my first term, and then not so well after that (I ended up doing fine in the end, but it took longer to get through a degree program because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up; I think that Americans, by and large, put too much focus on going to university too early and we would be better served by an extra year of high school and/or a gap year).

One other thing I remember from that time period is that a better predictor of overall success in school was NOBITH, the Number Of Bathrooms In The House. That is, socioeconomic indicators were a better predictor than anything else, including nonsense standardized tests like the SAT. And given that socioeconomic indicators are a better indicator, that is a strong indication that there’s seriously wasted potential at all levels of eduction because we mistakenly equate family socioeconomics with success in general.