<p>I think sjmom nailed it. Coming from my small parochial school in podunk Iowa which doesn’t even offer any AP’s, the SAT provided some measure of something (ability? potential? savvy for taking a lame test? who cares…) that I had no other way of demonstrating.</p>
<p>I agree too with nedad’s point about the scores being a range. The SAT is a blunt measuring instrument, not a C-T scan of your brain. I like to think that most colleges feel this way too and therefore use the scores responsibly. But it is not hard to understand why students often doubt this is the case, when, for example, you see the National Merit Scholarship Program using the PSAT score as a hard cutoff.</p>