Actually, no, they are not. That conversation ended by the late-Eighties. SATs benefit children of color and poor children the most. “Bias” is not a matter of opinion, when you’ve done your statistical work; on item analyses, run through every gender, race/ethnicity, urban suburban, rural, low- middle - and high SES and a dozen others. Their very tight specifications mean reliability and predictive validity, all comfortably int he .9 range, which is pretty unassailable. SES only accounts for 14% of the variance. Having been in the business a while, that is quite good. .
It is unlikely all the testing companies around the world all conspired so that. . . Asian kids do the best. If you don’t want admissions officers to have more power - and actually they do better than most understand - then you don’t want the SATs not in the mix. This goes to the heart of the profoundly anti-intellectual, know-nothing anti-testing crowd. And isn’t it interesting that testing companies from around the world all see pretty much similar trends? You know who talks about this fact? African-American intellectuals, educators. As they have for half a century or more.
“We need diversity” yes, of course - who seriously argues about that? For the Freshman class at Harvard, African-American students account for 18% of the population. African Americans overall account for 14% of our country’s population. The same is true, also, for our federal workforce, 18% African-American. The river keeps moving.
I apologize in advance if I’m being a bit twerky. But I do this work, have done it for decades, and the level of cluelessness and dishonesty in some corners is infuriating.