The SAT is hardly perfect. It isn’t strictly an aptitude test: The more you read and the more math you know, the better you are going to do. Maybe we should go all the way and use achievement tests instead? But that has its own problems, as Howard Wainer of the University of Pennsylvania pointed out in his book Uneducated Guesses. How much does proficiency in one subject area weigh against another? And this doesn’t help if a student is in a rotten school that teaches nothing.

The SAT aims to predict first-year performance in college, with only modest success. The test explains about 24 percent of the variation in performance during the first year of college, while high-school GPA explains 34 percent, according to Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University. But when the two are combined, they account for 41 percent of the variation. With its broader, more general approach, the SAT provides different information about students than either GPA or achievement tests. It is a useful tool.

At the end of the day, the problem isn’t the SAT, it’s ourselves. We have to do a better job raising and educating kids. That is much harder than complaining about the SAT, and the College Board can’t do it for us.