Most societies have some sort of rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. The aborigine in Australia send adolescents into the wilderness on a "walkabout." German noblemen prove their maturity by acquiring dueling scars.
Americans have one in which their young people spend three high-pressured hours filling in little boxes. Anthropologists call it "Taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test."
What do they measure? To anyone with lingering faith in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and truth-in-packaging, the answer is obvious: The Scholastic Aptitude Test measures scholastic aptitude. For that answer score zero.
The test was created in 1926, when people still believed that there was something called intelligence that experts could measure and put a number on. Scholastic aptitude was its academic counterpart.
Today no one believes that intelligence is that simple, and developers of the aptitude test have backed away from claiming to measure aptitude.
What does the test tell colleges? The College Board says the examination predicts college grades in the freshman year. The technical term is predictive validity, which is measured on a scale of zero to one. Zero means that the result would be as random as using a zip code. A perfect 1.0 means that everyone with high test scores will get high grades, everyone with low scores will get low grades and so forth.
Testmakers' research shows that college freshmen grades can be predicted with a validity of 0.42 based on the aptitude test, 0.48 based on high school grades and 0.55 if both are used. Since colleges already have students' grades, the incremental advantage of having the test scores is 0.07.
Do test scores change admissions decisions? In a new book, "The Case Against the S.A.T.," James Crouse and Dale Trushei.m of the University of Delaware argue that the test is "valid but redundant." They conducted their own studies and concluded that by using high school grades alone, they could come to the same conclusion as admissions directors in all but 3 percent of cases-not enough, in their opinion, to justify the whole enterprise.