Actually, posts on this thread have opened me up to what the other side is saying. I still feel very strongly that SAT math should be required for STEM majors especially at average state schools like mine. I don’t have any data to back it up other than personal experience working with numerous students who are attracted to engineering because of the job/money prospect but are ill-prepared to do the work due to serious lack of very basic math skills.
I’m not concerned with issues like “should I retake SAT if my math score is only 790 so my MIT/Caltech apps won’t be derailed.” These are high-class problems. I’m concerned with those on the other end of the spectrum, who were accepted to engineering but probably shouldn’t. An additional data point in the form of SAT math scores on their apps would be helpful to know where they are, math-wise. It saves them time and money and also helps with their mental health.
Apart from “SAT math should be required for STEM majors,” I don’t have as strong a feeling as I used to on other situations after reading through the thread, seeing the back and forth. If you ask me how useful SAT EBRW scores are for STEM majors, I would say not very, as long as they’re not alarmingly low. As for majors that are very far from STEM, I can’t imagine SAT math scores to be super useful (other than to help rank applicants at selective schools) and I don’t know about these vastly different majors to have an opinion on the value of SAT EBRW scores.