In a move that made national headlines last February, University of California President Richard Atkinson unveiled a plan to drop the SAT I as a requirement for admission to the 10 campuses of the UC system. In its place, Atkinson proposed replacing the SAT I with a new, more "holistic" system of admissions, one which draws in equal measure upon grades, test scores, and the vaguely defined category of "life experiences."

A year after he first announced his intention to drop the SAT I, Atkinson’s new system is now in place. Under an admissions scheme called “comprehensive review,” the SAT I will be replaced by the SAT II. Where the SAT I aimed to assess a student’s mathematical and linguistic aptitude, the so-called "subject tests" of the SAT II gauge knowledge in particular disciplines such as mathematics, natural science, social studies and foreign languages.

As the largest state university system in the nation, the University of California in many respects sets the standard for public universities around the country. Over the coming months and years, others are sure to follow California’s example and rid themselves of the much reviled SAT I. But does it matter? For those of us with no immediate interest in the fortunes of the educational-testing industry, the demise of the SAT I is a topic that’s hard to get excited about.

But we should get excited. As I argued shortly after Atkinson went public with his plans to dismantle the SAT I, doing away with the test risks much and promises nothing. Indeed, none of the arguments offered by Atkinson and those who support his proposal succeed in identifying a single compelling reason for overhauling the present system. Taken together, they only barely manage to conceal the real agenda behind the drive to dismantle the SATs: to continue discriminating in favor of racial and ethnic minorities in an age in which traditional affirmative action is on the legal defensive.

The distinctly weak arguments marshaled by those who favor replacing the SAT I with a new regime of "comprehensive review" include:

• "The SAT is biased in favor of the wealthy." Of all the arguments for doing away with the SAT I, this is by far the most common. According to this view, since only wealthy parents can afford to send their children through the battery of costly preparatory courses offered by Kaplan and Princeton Review (around 14 percent of all parents do so, at a price tag of $1,000-$3,000), these same students enjoy a considerable advantage over everyone else come exam day.

Well, no. Though companies offering preparatory courses may advertise large payoffs in exam performance, the evidence suggests that those who take such courses enjoy only the most modest advantage compared with those who don’t: on average, 18 additional points on the math section of the test and 8 on the verbal. On a 1,600-point test, a 26-point bump is not enough to advance from one performance bracket to the next. In other words, a bad student who takes an SAT preparatory course will on average put in an only slightly less bad — but still bad — showing on the test than he would have done otherwise. Similarly, a good student who takes a preparatory course will on average put in a slightly better showing. In neither of these types of cases will the improvement radically change the student’s chances for admission to a particular school.

• "The SAT measures test-taking ability, not aptitude." After "intelligence", which it was meant to replace, "aptitude" has long ranked as one of the most elusive and controversial of diagnostic categories. And yet to claim, as Atkinson has done, that the SAT is solely a measure of one’s "skill at taking tests" is crudely misleading. On the one hand, it is obviously true that the SAT is first and foremost a measure of one’s ability to take the SAT. But the same holds for your French exam or last week’s physics midterm: whatever else they are, these (and all) tests are measures of a student’s skill in taking them. That’s just the way tests are.

The real question is whether a test correlates: that is, whether a student’s performance on a given test is an accurate reflection of that student’s level of knowledge in the field which the tests claims to measure. Does performance on a French exam, for example, appropriately reflect a student’s ability in the French language? Does last week’s physics midterm successfully gauge the student’s grasp of physical scientific knowledge?

In the case of the SAT, a test intended to measure "aptitude" for college-level work, the answer is that the test does correlate — and well. Think about it: Is a student’s ability to perform basic mathematical computations, draw inferences from expository passages, and make analogies — the meat and bones of the SAT I — really so irrelevant to his chances for success in college? And what are the chances for academic success of someone who can do none of these things well but has plenty of interesting "life experiences?" In this sense, the SAT is an even better gauge of college level aptitude than a student’s record taking French or physics exams: while one can easily improve one’s performance in these disciplines by dint of hard work, the same does not hold for what the SAT tests. Basic vocabulary, logical reasoning and mathematical imagination are the work of a lifetime, not a semester.

• "The SAT I is not a good predictor of student performance." That’s what Atkinson says anyway. But you have to wonder, what is his standard? For it turns out that, compared to high school GPAs, SAT performance is only slightly less successful at predicting college grades. When you combine the two, as college admissions officers do, you get an indicator of future performance which study after study have shown to be superior to either GPAs or SAT scores taken alone. Sixty-one percent of the 48,039 students surveyed in a recent Educational Testing Service study received the grades predicted by the SAT/GPA index during their freshman year. In other words, grades and test performance provide a solid, if not flawless, basis for estimating a student’s chances of success. Significantly, at the time he made his criticisms, Atkinson had nothing better to offer.

• "The SAT II is a better criterion of achievement than the SAT I." The idea here is that the SAT II, or "subject", tests are preferable to the SAT I, "aptitude" portion of the exam because they more faithfully measure what the student has learned in high school. There are two problems with this view. In the first place, that’s what grades are for: If a student has already taken classes and examinations in, say, natural science, why should he then take a national exam on the same subject?

Second, by including the "foreign language" exam in the battery of subject exams to which prospective students are now submitted, the new system gives a bonus to first-generation immigrants and their children (a significant chunk of California’s population), who typically speak one language at home and another at school. According to UC Regent, Ward Connerly, the language portion of the SAT II was included only at the insistence of Sacramento’s powerful Latino lobby, who threatened to defund the University if it refused to comply with its wishes. As a result, recent immigrants and their children are at a considerable advantage compared with the vast majority of native-born Californians. And this is supposed to be fairer than the old system?

• "The SAT I is racially and ethnically biased." For years it has been fashionable to claim that the SAT I is somehow racially loaded in favor of white students. On this patronizing view, black and Latino students on average do worse than whites and Asians because poverty and cultural difference make them unable to correctly approach problems in which, say, sports skiing or classical music are discussed. (Somehow this argument is never extended to the math portion of the test, though blacks and Latinos do worse there, too). Though empty, such criticisms have caused the Educational Testing Service, which is in charge of designing each year’s test, to become extremely sensitive to the possibility of so-called "cultural bias": More so than ever before, the SAT I is now color blind. Even so, it continues to be charged with covert racism. Here we have yet another example of the principle: "If it doesn’t turn out our way, it’s your fault."

And here we arrive at the crux of the matter. There’s nothing wrong with the SAT I. For years, it has done what it was designed to do: provide an objective measure for comparing students from very different educational backgrounds. Indeed, Atkinson and company know this very well: If they were serious in their criticisms of the SAT I, they would have extended these criticisms to the GRE and LSAT, which are also aptitude tests for which one can take expensive preparatory courses.

That they haven’t done so is telling. For the administration of the University of California, the problem with the SAT I isn't an academic one; it’s a political one. Each year, black and Latino students significantly under-perform compared to their white and Asian counterparts on the SAT I. As the political clout of these groups grows, so too does the pressure to enroll larger numbers of black and Latino students. But since the 1996 passage of Proposition 209, a state ballot initiative banning affirmative action in state hiring and admissions, this has become a difficult thing to do.

For Atkinson and his friends at the University of California, disposing of the SAT I provides a way out of this dilemma. By replacing merit-based impediments to an "open" admissions policy with a system designed to increase the weight accorded such non-academic factors as "personal challenge" and "life experience," the University of California has given itself a free hand to artificially increase the number of "under-represented" minorities in the UC system. In other words, affirmative action is back in the saddle.

Doing away with the SAT I, however, is sure to have consequences besides the intended ones. The University of California has long been regarded as one of the finest public universities in the country. With a booming state population, a stagnant budget, and an admissions policy loaded in favor of groups, not talents, the UC is well on its way to becoming an overpopulated backwater.

Meanwhile, California continues to export its failures. In mid-March UC Berkeley hosted a national "summit" on the SATs, jointly organized by BAMN ("By Any Means Necessary", a UC student group devoted to overturning Proposition 209) and Berkeley’s Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and African American Studies departments. No surprise: The summit aims to advance the view that the SATs are racially discriminatory and to encourage other universities to follow suit by eliminating it. As Hoku Jeffrey, student senator and member of Berkeley’s Defend Affirmative Action party, remarked, "there is no such thing as an objective standardized test. There’s no objective man."

Hoku may just be on to something: At the University of California, where minority pressure groups rule, the "objective man," like the objective test, is on a fast track to extinction.