American education has one job: to educate. And it’s flunking. Probably no one would dispute that.
From collapsing K–12 literacy rates to bloated, ideologically driven university curricula, the U.S. is producing a generation of poorly educated—often outright uneducated—citizens. Plenty of blame has rightly landed on K–12 schools and universities. But there’s another player quietly contributing to the problem: college admissions testing companies. These middlemen—most notably the College Board and ACT, Inc.—write and administer the SAT and ACT, the gateway exams for higher education.
Last year, in response to declining student performance, the College Board made various modifications to the SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test), the most widely used college entrance exam in the United States. These changes not only simplified the exam—they made it easier.
One change, aimed at the Reading and Writing section of the test, shrank text lengths from between 500-750 words to anywhere between 25-150 words. The College Board defended the shortened excerpts, now approximately the length of a social media post, claiming that the exam “operates more efficiently” when presented in “small rather than larger units,” and that students may not “connect with the subject matter of a long passage.”
As a result, lengthier reading material such as passages from the U.S. founding documents/Great Global Conversation subject area was not made a formal requirement, with the College Board contending that the ability to read and analyze such passages is “not an essential prerequisite for college and career readiness.” Further retreating from rigor, the optional essay was eliminated from the exam entirely.
“Lowering the bar for academic achievement does nothing to help students,” Defense of Freedom Co-Founder and President Robert Eitel told Minding the Campus. “In reality, students deserve every opportunity to excel, and schools should be helping them reach their fullest potential instead of continually lowering their expectations for student performance.”
Other modifications to the SAT include a switch from paper to digital format, shorter test lengths, fewer questions, and increased time per question.
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Making matters worse, a recent Goldwater Institute report confirmed that the College Board uses taxpayer dollars, of which it is a huge recipient, to promote race-based ideology.
This is also reflected in the College Board’s 2024 changes, which describe college readiness as an “essential but elusive goal, particularly for members of historically underserved population groups,” also citing “societal and educational inequities.”
It continues by listing statistics from the high school graduating class of 2022, when only 26 percent of Hispanic/Latino students and 19 percent of Black/African American students met College and Career Readiness Benchmarks as opposed to their Caucasian (53 percent) and Asian American (75 percent) counterparts.
The College Board then expressed support for “accessible testing situations” where students are not “unduly advantaged or disadvantaged by individual characteristics” such as “age, disability, race/ethnicity, gender, or language.”
To that end, the SAT exam was modified to be “adaptive,” meaning that the computer collects data on students’ aptitude and “adjusts the difficulty of the questions […] based on the student’s test-taking performance.” In essence, students will be evaluated against the limits of their own abilities rather than a set standard, rendering the exam useless for comparing academic performance across the board.
It’s not surprising, then, that the chairman of the College Board’s governing board oversaw the issuing of a “letter of opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision to end race-based discrimination in college admissions.”
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Although organizations like the College Board have the power to set the standard of academic excellence, they are not combating the trend of student ineptitude; instead, they are acquiescing to it. One artificial intelligence (AI) model found that the SAT has been getting easier by four points each year since 2008, and the ACT is projected to soon follow suit with similar adjustments.
According to the College Board’s website, test scores are a reliable predictor of collegiate success and accurately foretell graduation rates. But even if the American public were convinced that a single number could dismiss 13 years of schoolwork from the ACT or SAT, the College Board has effectively abdicated its mission by lowering scholarly standards, rather than raising them.
In doing so, the College Board has stuffed the pipeline into higher education—and, subsequently, the workforce—with unprepared and undereducated graduates. The result? A generation of degree-holders whose credentials project a false sense of readiness—something employers are increasingly noticing.
According to one report, only 58 percent of companies say they will consider hiring from the graduating class of 2025. Another study spoke with hiring managers looking to fill entry-level positions; 33 percent thought recent college graduates lacked work ethic, while 24 percent said they were unprepared for the workforce.
Today, over half of U.S. adults are unable to read at a sixth-grade level or higher. These statistics are not only disappointing; they’re humiliating.
Liza Libes, a college essay coach who has spent the past decade helping students apply to top universities, recently wrote that the reason reading and writing sections on the exam keep getting easier is because “College readiness no longer entails the ability to think critically or to write well.” Instead of raising the bar and holding students—and schools—to a higher standard, the College Board is capitulating to poorly educated youth whose attention spans aren’t even conducive to text longer than a social media post—if they can read at all. The result is a generation of students with diminished reading stamina and little incentive—or opportunity—to become strong writers. Furthermore, chalking up every discrepancy to “systemic bias” and “racial inequality” ignores legitimate culprits, such as big-time teacher’s union bosses who stand in the way of school choice and keep kids—oftentimes the low-income and minority ones—trapped in failing schools.
The recent changes made to the SAT by the College Board ultimately undermine the academic potential of Americans. It is well worth questioning whether organizations like the College Board, many of which receive federal funding, will actually prove useful in the long term.
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