Ramesh, I likewise found Walter Kirn’s essay to be haphazard, but for a different reason. Throughout the piece, Kirn relies heavily on the biography of Sonia Sotomayor, who has acknowledged that she scored poorly on the SAT. And it is with this anecdotal evidence in mind that Kirn forwards his argument that the SAT is a poor indicator of ability:

The fact that [Sotomayor] later graduated from Princeton with highest academic honors and went on to reach the upper echelons of her chosen career, the law, speaks well of her intellect, her drive and the discernment of Princeton’s admissions office, but it doesn’t speak well, necessarily, of the conventional, test-based notions of merit that might well have stopped her, had they been strictly applied, before she even got started.

To buy this argument is to believe that affirmative action ends once admissions letters have been postmarked. It’s no secret to anyone who’s spent time at a competitive college that the affirmative-action life raft is present in lecture halls and seminar rooms. And why wouldn’t it be? If the faculty and staff of a college are indoctrinated into the belief that affirmative action in admissions is a positive practice, they have every reason to perpetuate it in their classes. I obviously can’t speak to Sotomayor’s college performance, but the idea that her high grades at Princeton demonstrate the efficacy of affirmative action is just silly.

– Lucy Morrow Caldwell is an intern at National Review.