I saw a few days ago that Yale was reinstating the SAT. They're joining Dartmouth and Brown of the Ivies as well as MIT. I have no idea what percent of applicants, let alone percent those receiving offers, took the exam anyway for other school applications.

Some of my friends thought this was great - a return to standards!!!! Others felt it was a regressive move and it will hurt diversity and equity.

For me, I think it's all about branding.

As my friends know, I'm no fan of the college board. They make standardized tests and do their best to both make money and to influence education through programs like the SAT/PSAT and the AP program. Many have noted that a high SAT score is not a reflection of intelligence but rather of income. This makes sense. Children from well to do backgrounds will have better educational opportunities, more support at home, and be better prepared for a standardized test. It also makes sense that these students will be better prepared to face college where life is less forgiving than high school. It's not fair and it's not right, but well to do kids are better set up for college success.

If I had my druthers, both the SAT and the College Board would just go away.

That said, let's dive in to why I believe that the whole SAT required vs SAT optional isn't really about building an incoming class, equitable or otherwise, but rather about image and branding.

For "elite" institutions, image and branding is huge. The truth is, you can get a class for class equivalent education from a second or third tier school as you can from Harvard at a fraction of the cost. You can't get the resources that Harvard provides due to its immense wealth nor can you get the old boys club connections nor the name that opens doors even if you're less than competent. I've seen this time and time again in industry where a candidate from an Ivy or similar will get offers, opportunities and promotions while just not being that good whereas someone from a no-name school has to actually be good (yes, I know plenty of Ivy students are actually quite good but I've met plenty of dopes).

Go SAT optional and you appease your more liberal fans. SAT required? The elitists and "meritocracy" crowd will cheer.

Image and PR win the day.

Take CS50 for example. It's the golden CS0 course with all the hype but if you look more closely it's a flawed implementation of a flawed course. Not horrible but nothing special. It wins because it's from Harvard's rep and ballyhoo - a charismatic barker at the helm and a class filled with students preculled to succeed by Harvard's admission process. Nevermind the huge waits for TAs when projects are due or all that cheating we heard about a couple of years ago. It's Harvard and it has hype so it's good.

Same for the SAT. You've got a high SAT cut off? You must be elite!!!

Elite institutions can shape their incoming classes however they want. A few years ago Harvey Mudd proudly achieved gender parity in CS. Now, Harvey Mudd could have and probably did make some changes in what they did once students were in their walls, but let's look at shaping the incoming class.

I found data for accepted students for Harvey Mudd online. I didn't check the year - it doesn't matter. Here are the raw numbers:

That's 13% acceptance rate and a 40% yield.

They also boasted a 3.96 GPA and an average SAT score of 1520.

Note that more women were both offered and accepted in spite of only roughly half the number applying. I don't have older stats but I guess 10 years ago the offers skewed more male.

With just a 13% acceptance rate and Harvey Mudd's reputation it's easy to imagine that a HUGE number of qualified applicants were rejected. I've never looked at the numbers for Harvey Mudd applicants from Stuy but typically, for elite schools, far more qualified applicants are rejected from Stuy than are accepted. In any year, I might have five students accepted to say MIT, another 20 or more that were clearly qualified and capable of doing great and a handful that probably were right to be rejected. What's more, each year there were some rejected and the teachers all wondered, how did person A get accepted when person B didn't.

I'm betting it's the same in general for the application pools for all "elite" institutions. All Harvey Mudd had to do was skew their offers more female noting that the applicants they offer should have an inclination to go the CS route. They could do the same for minority applicants. None of this really changes the big picture. They're just rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic - grabbing the high performing CS inclined women who might otherwise go to, let's say Stanford or Berkeley.

It's like a friend who once lamented to me that even though the FANG companies (yes, old acronym - old conversation) made all sorts of claims about equity and diversity, their equity hiring program though consisted of out battling the other FANG companies for the handful of black CS students at "elite" universities.

Harvey Mudd or any of these institutions could probably keep the handful of "superachievers" - Westinghouse winners, IOI and IMO team members etc. from their class offers, throw everyone else out take the next n students in and the class would probably be remarkably similar and perform just as well. They could probably even do this a second and maybe a third time.

They can shape the classes however they want to achieve whatever look or result they want.

They can even let in students that require more academic support and still end up fine. All those division one athletes that didn't "come here to play school" are prime examples (of course, there are plenty of D1 athletes that did come to play school and are terrific students) - they're shunted to easier majors and receive huge amounts of support that regular students can't dream of.

Malcom Gladwell once wrote that the only fair way to form Harvard's incoming class would be for them to take all the qualified applicants, put them in a hat, and randomly select the offers. He was right and given the way colleges run their processes they can do what they want and come up with whatever they want, SAT or not.

Okay, so given this, it should be clear that requiring the SAT or not is really a nothingburger but I'll go further and say all requiring it does is that it puts stress on high school students and money into the coffers of the college board. It doesn't really give you a "stronger" incoming class, at least not if your admissions office is actually doing its job.

I spent my years at Hunter reading applications for my undergraduate CS honors program. I also spent a few years reading applications for the Macaulay Honors College - CUNY's elite branch.

For the first few years, we looked at SAT scores. For me, they were only useful for one thing - a very coarse math cull. My students were all coming in as intended CS majors. That meant they would have to take calc 1, calc 2, discrete, linear and a couple more math classes. If a student had a very low SAT math score, it was a red flag. SAT score didn't really tell me more than that.

Even then, I had to match this against transcript data. If a kid was struggling with geometry in 11th grade, they'll probably struggle with calc as a freshman so maybe not a good fit for my program. In fact, the transcript information - what class, what grade, and what year was far more valuable than SAT score in determining if a student was prepared for my program.

Now you might argue that high school grades are inconsistent and not every state has course level standardized testing like the New York State Regents Exams. I'll tell you what, it doesn't matter.

In very short order, I got to know schools and classes. I also got to know recommendation writers. By year three I knew what a grade in a given class meant for most schools in my applicant pool and how to read the recs. Sure, I'd have to merge in students from unknown schools but after a while you get a feel. The SAT was a nice little crutch but wholly unnecessary.

But, you say - you only had a few hundred applications and they were mostly local. Harvard and MIT have applicants from all over the world.

Yeah, they also have big admission offices with full staffs. I know that the "elite" colleges have specific people who read applications for sets of schools. Over the years, I've met the people who read Stuyvesant's applications from a few of these institutions. Like me, they knew what the courses meant at Stuy and their other schools and they also knew the recommenders - who were straight shooters, who dialed it in etc…. As they say "you gotta know the territory" and they did. I won't name names or schools but I bet if you honestly asked these readers that I've met if they really needed SAT scores to make a decision, they'd say no.

So, there you have it. SAT or no SAT? I'd be happy to get rid of it but everyone should recognize that it's really about image and not about forming an equitable and/or diverse incoming class. Colleges can do that already it's just that many don't really care to.