[vitaminbandit]

His heart surgery question is ridiculous, but standardized testing is clearly necessary. There are more than 30,000 high schools in the US, meaning 30,000+ valedictorians. There are ~1,500 freshmen spots at Harvard, how does Harvard choose who to admit? And which elite schools disregard SAT scores? I only did a small sample (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale) and they all require the SAT/ACT.

Secondly, many elite schools pride themselves on "need-blind" admissions, meaning they do not know the applicant's financial situation when deciding whether or not to admit him/her. This is to protect poor kids from being discriminated against (since they would need extra financial aid from the school), but it also means they can't give a leg-up to poor students.

Given that family income is highly correlated with SAT performance, it's pretty perverse that the best way for a poor student to gain admission into an elite university is to ace their SAT's and masquerade as a rich kid on their application.