Elite college admissions: What matters and by how much

[Data10]

This leads into my second criticism of the article, which is that they built the model using the wrong blueprints. Specifically, they performed their analysis on students that were already partially selected on the basis of their SAT scores. The ideal way to do this test would be to require every student to take the SAT, ignore it for the purpose of admission, and then analyze the GPA as a function of the SAT afterwards.

All of the studies are not ideal, some more so than others. However, when methodology is varied, they still come to a similar conclusion. For example, the 2nd linked study used a different approach than the first one that you referenced. It used a data set of 210k students at 356 colleges, with a wide variety of selectivity. At some of these colleges, most failed to graduate. At at some colleges, the vast majority graduated. Some colleges were not selective, to the point where SAT was nearly irrelevant for admissions decisions, as you described. They still found SAT score did not significantly improve prediction of graduation rate for the college and prediction of whether an individual student would graduate, beyond the rest of the controls.