“I know kids whose parents do not speak English, have an elementary school education, are working almost a full time job, participate in sports and extracurricular activities, volunteer in the community and get 1290 or in the 1300s in the SAT with zero prep, no Khan, no doing practice test.”
I think those kids would have gotten in even before test optional, it’s not like 1300s are bad scores. However they probably wouldn’t have applied, so it does help them, agree.
“think people are upset because TO is changing the landscape at some elite schools and making admissions even more competitive - especially for unhooked (not legacy, athlete or child of major donors) students. For most kids, their chances are small to begin with - even with a high score - and this makes it tougher”
I don’t think it’s just elite schools, however you want to define that, as being tougher to get in, it’s many schools outside the top 20 as well. These are place where say the admit rate is 40% so a match and it’s 15-20%, now a reach.
"That was what the UC study you linked suggested. It did not recommend keeping the SAT. It recommended that UC develop a new test to replace it, "
All these studies don’t include test optional at stem majors right, especially engineering or pre-med at public universities like Berkeley? Until you include public schools and majors that have lower graduation rates, more weed out, it’s really only partial analysis of test non-submitter vs test submitter. You’d have to find similar graduation rates between test non-submitters and submitters across engineering majors at say UCB or Purdue to claim there’s no difference, especially if you’re assuming the test submitters have considerably higher scores.