LOS ANGELES

WHEN SMITH COLLEGE and Wake Forest University in May became the latest institutions of higher learning to make submission of Scholastic Assessment Test scores optional in the admissions process, the College Board, which runs the tests, denied that their defection constituted a trend. Instead, it countered that the volume of those taking the test rose by 2 percent over last year.

Whether the increase is significant is debatable in light of the growing number of applicants applying to the about 2,500 accredited colleges and universities across the country. But what is not arguable is the purpose of the SAT. The goal of the test remains essentially the same since it was first conceived by the psychologist Carl C. Brigham in 1926.

At that time, the instrument was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test in the belief that it measured innate ability. But by 1994, the College Board changed the name to the Scholastic Assessment Test after it began to have second thoughts that the test was associated too often with eugenics. In 1997, in a further attempt to avoid controversy, the board decided on SAT, which stands for nothing.

To understand why the SAT continues to be a lightning rod for criticism, it’s necessary to take a closer look at why and how the granddaddy of all tests is put together.

Because grading standards vary widely from school to school, admissions officers quite understandably seek some common measure as they evaluate applicants. The SAT promises to make their task easier by ranking students on a standardized test taken by thousands of students around the globe.

That’s where the problem begins. If the designers of the SAT loaded up the test with items measuring the most important content taught effectively by teachers in the classroom, too many scores might be clumped together. In that case, comparisons would be impossible. It wouldn’t be long, therefore, before the College Board found its cash cow running dry, as schools failed to renew their contracts.

To protect its highly profitable franchise, the SAT designers are forced out of necessity to deliberately build into the test a disproportionate number of items that largely measure what students bring to class in the form of their socioeconomic backgrounds, rather than what they learn in class through inspired instruction. This strategy has consistently been found to produce the indispensable score spread that allows applicants to be ranked.

In light of the evidence showing a tight connection between SAT scores and ZIP codes, the posture taken by the College Board becomes increasingly untenable. Yet, despite the data showing that about 30 percent, or nearly 760 colleges and universities, have made at least some standardized tests optional, according to Fair Test, a nonprofit advocacy group, the College Board continues to maintain that the test is a useful predictor of college performance.

That claim was called into question in the fall of 2004, when Bates College released the findings of its 20-year study of its SAT-optional policy. The highly selective college found virtually no differences in the four-year academic performance and on-time graduation rates of 7,000 submitters and non-submitters of SAT scores.

Bates’s experience is a reminder of the difference between selection effects and treatment effects. It isn’t so much the applicant’s qualifications (the selection effect) that determines academic performance in college but the four years spent in the classroom (the treatment effect). In other words, students do well because they are in a good school, rather than because they are inherently good students.

This counterintuitive observation was supported by evidence presented in 1998 in The Shape of the River by William G. Bowen, a former Princeton president, and Derek Bok, a former Harvard president. They found that students admitted under affirmative action performed only slightly below class average, and after graduation outgained many of their peers. So, as in the Bates study, what happens after matriculation matters far more than rankings by the admissions office.

That’s why the SAT is increasingly seen as an anachronism. By continuing to argue that it has value, the College Board is losing whatever credibility it has left.

Walt Gardner taught for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District and was a lecturer in the UCLA Graduate School of Education ( walt.gard@verizon.net).