The ABA requires a “valid and objective admissions test”. What is the reason for this requirement?

The above tweet references an article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on March 31, 2016.

The overall theme of the article is that because grades are no longer a reliable indicator of student abilities, then standardized tests are the only thing that schools really have.

An excerpt from the article includes:

It might seem unfair that admissions officers place almost as much weight on a one-morning test as they do on grades from four years of high school, as a 2011 survey from the National Association for College Admissions Counseling showed. But there’s a simple reason for this emphasis on testing: Policy makers and educators have effectively eliminated all the other ways of quantifying student performance.

Classroom grades have become meaningless. Last year a public-school district in northern California decided to score on an “equal interval scale”—meaning every letter grade is assigned a 20-point range. Students who score above 80% get an A. Only those below 20% will be given an F. This is only part of a larger trend.


A comment to the article included:

I have never recruited for an academic institution, but I have done a great deal for businesses. When recruiting for entry level technical or management career path positions, SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT and other competitive standardized tests are great indicators of a candidate’s general mental “horsepower” and ability to learn relative to other candidates. Grades by subject matter areas give an idea of where a candidate’s interests and proclivities are. The presence of difficult subject matter courses, even with mediocre grades, gives a sense for work ethic. Extracurricular activities give an idea of a candidate’s psychological balance and social engagement. Absent a work history, these indicators, supplemented with personal interview results, work pretty well to predict success when matched up with job requirements. Businesses look at SATs and the rest because the information they convey is very predictive of performance.

This debate has been going on since the beginning of the standardized testing industry.