Fee waivers are great. A lot of poor parents are too busy / don't have their shit together enough to learn about them & use them. A lot of poor parents won't even have their kids take the tests at all even if they are free, especially if it means taking an entire day to drive them to the test facility. They might not even know what an SAT test is.
Hm that's true, but the alternative would also be flawed, and possibly worse. If you could only take the SAT once and you were stuck with that score, then people would complain that rich kids could take all sorts of prep courses to get ready and to figure out what they needed to work on before taking the test, whereas poor kids would be figuring this all out on test day. There is no ideal way to do this, and the current system may be better than anything else.
Also, in a decent number of states, it's mandatory for all HS students to take (and I believe free to students as a result).
That's true. It seems like those states where its mandatory and free are going the right way. No doubt stuff like this will be more and more important with AI making it so easy to fake other stuff.