The thing is, admissions to elite universities is almost never about test scores. Immigrant parents from countries like China and India are used to test scores mattering a lot. In those countries, your absolute score on the National Exam determines not only your placement into a university, but also what fields are available to you for study.
The SAT is nothing like that. If you walk into Harvard or Princeton, you'll find that most of the kids got above 2300 on the SAT, and a ton had perfect scores. If you tried using the SAT to distinguish between members of the student body at either place, you would have little success. The admissions committee has the same problem, so, kids are not selected based on SATs. You get in because you're good, or at least, you show a lot of promise, not because you can study for a test.
So yeah, maybe asians have higher test scores as a cohort, but maybe they also have less other things that are equally important -- sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc. These things count just as much in admissions decisions.
It's possibly to argue that selecting for these things is inherently racist, but I mean, what isn't? The SAT itself privileges a white collar suburban education. Who's to say it's more valuable to be able to memorize vocab, or do arithmetic than to run or paint?
The SAT is nothing like that. If you walk into Harvard or Princeton, you'll find that most of the kids got above 2300 on the SAT, and a ton had perfect scores. If you tried using the SAT to distinguish between members of the student body at either place, you would have little success. The admissions committee has the same problem, so, kids are not selected based on SATs. You get in because you're good, or at least, you show a lot of promise, not because you can study for a test.
So yeah, maybe asians have higher test scores as a cohort, but maybe they also have less other things that are equally important -- sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc. These things count just as much in admissions decisions.
It's possibly to argue that selecting for these things is inherently racist, but I mean, what isn't? The SAT itself privileges a white collar suburban education. Who's to say it's more valuable to be able to memorize vocab, or do arithmetic than to run or paint?