Everybody complains about the college admissions process, but practically nobody ever looks into college admissions tests to see if they could be improved or even if, as they appear to be are getting worse. That’s probably because:
A. Thinking about the SAT and the like is hard.
B. The big racial gaps in test scores are, even more than in the past, society’s Forbidden Topic, so it’s possible that anybody respectable who looks into whatever is going on with the SAT will get himself canceled.
So, we have this situation where David Coleman gets unaccountable power over the SAT test because he’d earlier sold Bill Gates on the Common Core. And Gates had bought off most of the educational thinktanks in America with generous donations. So when Gates decided he liked the Common Core, everybody jumped on board across the country without pausing to test it first.
Because the Common Core was riding so high about a decade ago (it has largely been forgotten today as the billionaire-driven Ed Reform mania of the early 21st century has vanished), the College Board hired Coleman to make the SAT reflect the Common Core. So Coleman rolled out a big change in the SAT in 2017, with some unexpected results: notably, Native American scores plummeted and Asian scores skyrocketed.