Wake Forest University has recently announced that it is dropping the requirement that applicants take the SAT. The predictable justification — the desire to become more “diverse.” Officials said that there are better indicators of academic capability, such as grade averages, but that doesn’t pass the laugh test. High schools vary enormously in their rigor. Straight-A students at some schools would have a hard time earning Cs at others.

Highly pertinent to all this is Peter Salins’ article today on Minding the Campus. Salins, the former SUNY provost, has strong evidence to refute the claims that the SAT is useless information for college admissions people, assuming that they’re interested in assembling a student body that’s fairly homogeneous in brainpower.

What if we ditched not only the SAT, but all other means of assessing academic capability and had a bureaucracy to assign students to schools to create the greatest possible level of “diversity”? That would really shuffle the students around! Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Oh sure, some kids with perfect math SAT scores would end up at schools where many other students have half that, but big deal. If the math courses are too easy, they can ask the prof for some more challenging material. Yeah, maybe the science nerds and math geeks wouldn’t progress quite as fast, but in the interest of diversity and equality, wouldn’t that be a small price to pay?