In a recent post at National Review, Jason Richwine examined recent trends at the College Board.

Why Has the College Board Gotten So PC?

Two familiar tropes about the SAT have haunted the Web over the past couple of weeks, and they may be more directly related than they seem.

The first is the annual hand-wringing over stagnant scores — a woe-is-us effort spearheaded by the College Board itself, which publishes and sells the SAT. According to the Board’s press release, only 42.6 percent of SAT-takers meet its definition of college and career readiness, and this presents a “readiness challenge” that has persisted for years.

As I noted in response to the Board’s similar “call to action” last year, missing from the discussion is what percentage of students should be college-ready. How can the SAT results be disappointing without some a priori understanding of what constitutes success? Rather than fretting over an arbitrary score threshold each year, a more productive activity would be to analyze the degree to which our school system is tailoring instruction to individual student needs.

The second trope is citing the positive correlation between scores and parental income as evidence that the SAT is biased against the poor, and that it foments inequality. The Wall Street Journal has a recent example, following the Washington Post’s lead from last spring.

That argument is, to put it bluntly, political correctness on steroids. The SAT predicts college performance roughly equally well for all income groups. In fact, to the extent there is any difference, the test tends to overpredict the college performance of low-income students — i.e., it is slightly biased in their favor. Furthermore, as long as (a) smarter people tend to have higher incomes, and (b) smarter people tend to have smarter children, then the positive score-income correlation will inevitably exist. That’s not an elite conspiracy, just common sense.