SCOTUS further restricts racial preferences

[Derec]

Nope.

I already explained why Loren is correct here. Your one word gainsaying is not a rebuttal.
Please offer a reasoned argument why you think "nope". Thank you.

 

[Derec]

What is your data that supports that dispensing with SAT and ACT as part of the admissions process will cause universities to water down their degrees?

They will admit less academically prepared but more politically correct student body.
I already offered an example of a local college that significantly watered down their curriculum in the last few years. And yes, they no longer require the SAT. Fancy that.

In another post, you assert that dispensing with the ACT will favor the wealthy. Are you asserting that wealthy students are less well prepared than not wealthy students? Because that seems like a remarkable shift from your earlier positions in other threads about the SAT.

I already explained it to you, but you ignored it. Fancy prep courses run into law of diminishing returns. A cheap online question bank and/or even cheaper paper prep book is all that is really needed. And every student, rich-poor, white-black-Asian, male-female, etc. still has to put in the work, study, and take the three hour exam on exam day.
With essays, a parent can just pay somebody to write the essay. With activities that may impress adcoms, connections go a long way and/or may cost a lot in equipment or travel costs.

So why do you (and other leftists) have such an irrational hateboner for SAT/ACT when things like essays or fancy extracurriculars are much more gameable by the rich?

 

[Derec]

Unlike with Dobbs overturning Roe, one cannot claim that the Court is out of step with the American public.
Quite the contrary, they are quite well in step. Even blacks don't show overwhelming support for the policy, but are pretty evenly split. Other racial groups show overwhelming opposition.

It is the Democratic Party establishment, even alleged moderates like Biden, who are out of step here.

 

[Toni]

What is your data that supports that dispensing with SAT and ACT as part of the admissions process will cause universities to water down their degrees?

They will admit less academically prepared but more politically correct student body.
I already offered an example of a local college that significantly watered down their curriculum in the last few years. And yes, they no longer require the SAT. Fancy that.

In another post, you assert that dispensing with the ACT will favor the wealthy. Are you asserting that wealthy students are less well prepared than not wealthy students? Because that seems like a remarkable shift from your earlier positions in other threads about the SAT.

I already explained it to you, but you ignored it. Fancy prep courses run into law of diminishing returns. A cheap online question bank and/or even cheaper paper prep book is all that is really needed. And every student, rich-poor, white-black-Asian, male-female, etc. still has to put in the work, study, and take the three hour exam on exam day.
With essays, a parent can just pay somebody to write the essay. With activities that may impress adcoms, connections go a long way and/or may cost a lot in equipment or travel costs.

So why do you (and other leftists) have such an irrational hateboner for SAT/ACT when things like essays or fancy extracurriculars are much more gameable by the rich?

Over the past few years, many if not most students have entered college less prepared than in previous years, thanks to COVID-19. This has nothing to do with using the SATs or not. I discussed this upthread—which you have forgotten or ignored.

I know how the SAT prep courses you mention work. What you do not seem to realize that there are actual sit in the room for weeks SAT prep classes and no, not all students have access to those. There are also a lot of expensive, private prep schools that start having their students take the SAT as early as 7th or 8th grade, repeating it every years with lots of supporting classes and tutoring. Yes, those students have an advantage with respect to achieving an higher score on the SAT over most other students.

But the SAT is done and irrelevant as soon as you are admitted to a university. It is as irrelevant as your high school year book. Doing well on the SAT does not do anything to improve your ability to actually do well in college. And colleges have recognized that the SAT is not nearly as productive of future academic success as other metrics, such as GPA.

 

[Toni]

Who do you think is going to be a more successful student at an IVY league school? Someone who did well in school and did well on the SATs (but not scoring a perfect score) or someone who achieved a perfect score because their entire life was about building the perfect resume to gain admittance to an Ivy League school?

I think both of these students are likely to do very well. Who is less likely to do well is somebody who got in with SAT scores well below those of the rest of the student body simply because of his or her race.
Let's look at Harvard stats again, shall we. I took the graph I posted previously from Harvard Crimson. Here is an excerpt:

A Crimson analysis of the previously confidential dataset — which spans admissions cycles starting with the Class of 2000 and ends with the cycle for the Class of 2017 — revealed that Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections. Every section of the SAT has a maximum score of 800.
By comparison, white admits earned an average score of 745 across all sections, Hispanic-American admits earned an average of 718, Native-American and Native-Hawaiian admits an average of 712, and African-American admits an average of 704.

This shows that not even Asian students generally have the perfect score. But they do, on average, very well on the SAT.
767 is 99th percentile for reading and writing and 96-98th for math. White average, 745, is 97-99th and 94-96th percentile respectively, still a very good result. When we get down to blacks, 704 is 93-96/91-93th percentiles. A good score for most universities for sure, but they would never have gotten a second look at Harvard if not for their race.

And who took extra cram courses to score well on a test, rather than took classes to learn and to learn what it is that they actually liked?

Why do you assume those who got admitted with mediocre stats but preferred skin color are more likely to take classes "to learn and to learn what it is that they actually liked"? This thread is about racial preferences.

What benefit do you imagine schools gain if they admit students who are unlikely to do well in their classes?

The benefit to the bigwigs is that their student body has a more politically correct racial breakdown. Even if they have to dumb down classes somewhat. In the case of Harvard, they give such a huge boost for being black, that their freshman class is 15% black. That is even more than percentage of blacks in the population at large!

As to not being able to keep up with the curriculum, some colleges plan to hide that by getting rid of some grades. In the name of "equity" of course.
To help new students adapt, some colleges are eliminating grades

"These efforts are meant to improve learning outcomes, as well as to be fair and advance equity, especially for new students and transfer students," Lewis said.

You eliminate SATs so you get crappier students. To hide that, you eliminate grades. Hooray for "equity"!

Perfect GPA isn't as predictive as you might think, even if the student took all the AP classes available to them. Perfect SAT scores are not, either.

Who is talking about perfect GPA or perfect score?
But a good GPA and a good SAT means that the student is more likely to succeed than a student with a mediocre SAT and GPA. That student would be more likely to succeed at an institution that is a better fit for their aptitude. It's not Harvard or bust. There are many good schools a notch less selective than the Ivys.

All a perfect SAT score means is that someone is good at taking that particular type of test. SATs are much better indicators of socioeconomic status of the student's parents than of the student's actual academic ability.

It's difficult to disentangle a student's actual academic ability from the family socioeconomic status. A student with successful parents is beneficiary not only of the family's greater financial resources, but he or she inherited parents' genes (nature) and was raised by them (nurture). It would be interesting to see how for example a family who won the lottery compares to a family that is successful through professional employment in their offspring's SAT scores.

This is not the 1950's anymore. Universities and businesses across many different specialties are discovering that increased diversity increases productivity in everything from IT to medical research and practice.

Why is diversity hailed only for mainstream universities but not HBCUs? With HBCUs the lack of diversity is a selling point. A bit of a hypocrisy there.
I do not have a problem with diversity. I have a problem with racial discrimination and the idea that less capable students should be admitted in order to achieve a desired racial breakdown (in the case of Harvard, even above parity).
Universities should not have banned black students in the past. Harvard should not have discriminated against Jewish students in the past. That was as wrong as the current discrimination they practice.

When you have a more diverse group in a school, a business, a classroom, a team, you gain multiple perspectives instead of the groupthink that comes from only admitting students who all took exactly the same courses and scored exactly the same perfect scores and..that's all there is to those students.

So what is your opinion of very non-diverse HBCUs. Is groupthink not a problem there? And again with "perfect scores". You do not need to restrict yourself to "perfect scores" to recognize that a student scoring 750 shows more aptitude than somebody scoring 700.
Groupthink, btw, can manifest itself other ways. Like hiring almost exclusively "progressive" faculty.

SAT scores and GPA do not indicate maturity, which IS a big predictor of academic success although that is difficult to measure or assess.

Neither does race. Nobody is saying SAT/GPA measure everything. But they are very good objective metrics of a student's academic performance.

SAT scores do not tell you if the student is suffering from acute depression, is able to think and act independently, is able to get along well with others.

Neither does race. So why do you insist race should be used, but SATs should not be.

More recent studies show that GPAs are more predictive of future academic success compared with SAT or ACT scores.

And both together are best. High school coursework is much broader and takes into account all four years of high school. But it suffers from significant differences between schools, so the numbers are not directly comparable. SAT is a test taken on one day, and measures a thinner slice of knowledge and skills, but it is equal for all test takers, and thus more comparable. These two metrics meausure different things, and both are very valuable.

Other studies show that the best predictor of academic success at a university is parental income.

Again, nature and nurture. Academic success is correlated (not perfectly, of course, but significantly) with income. And academically successful parents are more likely to have academically successful children. Both due to genes and due to the values and habits they pass on. Nature plus nurture, a powerful combo.

Really? You think that say, an extremely gifted rower or cellist or rugby player would be required to have extremely high SAT scores? Or the offspring of a wealthy donor?

Why is it that you assume that only those students with perfect SAT scores are sufficiently qualified to succeed at Harvard? What is magical about SAT scores?

The 704 score you sited is more than sufficient to do well at Harvard, if the student was similarly well prepared to succeed.

Who do you think will do better in a highly competitive environment such as Harvard: a student who attended years of cram courses and resume building extracurriculars in order to achieve a perfect SAT score and GPA with all the extra bells and whistles? Who never had the experience of not receiving an A or perfect score? Ever?

Or a student who earned very high SAT scores while working in his parents’ landscaping business or pizza place and tutored kids at the Y?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I don't think this will have any impact thanks to zip codes.

If colleges use zip codes as proxy for race, I think they would open themselves up to lawsuits.
But what about zip codes that straddle different neighborhoods of different racial and income demographics?

There will always be lawsuits.

 

[Derec]

Over the past few years, many if not most students have entered college less prepared than in previous years, thanks to COVID-19. This has nothing to do with using the SATs or not. I discussed this upthread—which you have forgotten or ignored.

It has everything to do with not using SAT. SAT measures math/reading/writing preparedness in a way that is unaffected by grade inflation that is variable between high schools - a 4.0 at one high school might be equivalent to 3.6 at another. If your hypothesis that it's just due to COVID holds, schools like the one I mention should return to their prior level of rigor in a couple of years, right? I do not see that happening, because the decline is for ideological reasons. You admit less qualified people, so how do you mask that? Make classes easier, in some cases trivially easy.

I know how the SAT prep courses you mention work. What you do not seem to realize that there are actual sit in the room for weeks SAT prep classes and no, not all students have access to those.

And I am saying they offer diminishing returns compared to self-studying with affordable materials like the UWorld question bank or printed books from Princeton Review I linked to before.

There are also a lot of expensive, private prep schools that start having their students take the SAT as early as 7th or 8th grade, repeating it every years with lots of supporting classes and tutoring. Yes, those students have an advantage with respect to achieving an higher score on the SAT over most other students.

Rich students have a big advantage whether you scrap the SAT or not. And many of those other advantages are a lot more affluence-sensitive than SAT.
Even the liberal WaPo sees it.
No one likes the SAT. It’s still the fairest thing about admissions.

But the SAT is done and irrelevant as soon as you are admitted to a university. It is as irrelevant as your high school year book. Doing well on the SAT does not do anything to improve your ability to actually do well in college. And colleges have recognized that the SAT is not nearly as productive of future academic success as other metrics, such as GPA.

Your point, even if true, is irrelevant because nobody is advocating getting rid of GPA as a metric. But GPA has the problem of not being directly comparable between the myriad of high schools students may come from. Everybody takes the same SAT.

I am saying use both. That way the inadequacies of either metric are compensated by the other. You advocate scrapping SATs for no good reason. Why some schools want to scrap it is pretty obvious - it would make shenanigans' like Harvard is involved in easier to hide if you have fewer objective metrics.

 

[Derec]

There will always be lawsuits.

But why deliberately open oneself to them by intentionally engaging in the kind of racial discrimination that SCOTUS has outlawed?

 

[pood]

As to legacy dipshits, are you seriously going to tell me that there are many, if any, black legacy admissions?

Yes, I am. Do you have any evidence that there are no, or not a significant number, of black legacies?

You obviously have no idea what legacy admissions are all about. They are, and have been for 100 years. affirmative action for white people. And now that the Supreme Court’s right-wing white contingent has thrown out affirmative action, whites will be doubly aided, as they were before affirmative action began. But if affirmative action violates equal protection, how can it be that legacy admissions do not?

Here is as brief history of the practice. From the article:

The practice of giving admission preference to legacy applicants has a long history, extending back to the 1920s, when some colleges began to use the practice as a backdoor strategy for limiting the number of Jewish, minority and immigrant students by giving preference to alumni’s children who were seldom Jewish, people of color or immigrants.

 

[Derec]

Really? You think that say, an extremely gifted rower or cellist or rugby player would be required to have extremely high SAT scores? Or the offspring of a wealthy donor?

That is not an argument to scrap or deemphasize SATs. It is an argument to deemphasize those other factors.
That said, athletics and music skills are still individual accomplishments. Being born black is not, and should not be a factor in admissions.

Why is it that you assume that only those students with perfect SAT scores are sufficiently qualified to succeed at Harvard? What is magical about SAT scores?

Nothing is "magical", and nobody is saying anything about "perfect SAT scores". You are the only one who keeps bringing up that canard.
SATs are useful in measuring how academically prepared a student is in terms of math and reading/writing in a way that is not affected by a particular high school's grading policies. Why do you keep ignoring that point?

The 704 score you sited is more than sufficient to do well at Harvard, if the student was similarly well prepared to succeed.

It is not unless the student is black. If a student is white, and especially if the student is Asian, they need a much higher score.
Is that blatant racial discrimination ok with you? Would it still be ok with you if it were reversed?

Who do you think will do better in a highly competitive environment such as Harvard: a student who attended years of cram courses and resume building extracurriculars in order to achieve a perfect SAT score and GPA with all the extra bells and whistles? Who never had the experience of not receiving an A or perfect score? Ever?
Or a student who earned very high SAT scores while working in his parents’ landscaping business or pizza place and tutored kids at the Y?

A white kid who works in his parents' landscaping business is still white. A Chinese kid who works in his family's restaurant is still Chinese.
And they both would get dinged for being of their respective races.
At the same time, a black student who attends cram courses and still gets a 704 will have an advantage over both of them. Because Harvard wants a 15% black freshman class no matter what.

I think work experience is a valuable thing in one's application. Again, nobody here is saying that grades and SATs should be the only metric. I, and some others, are merely saying that
- SATs are a valuable, objective metric
- race should not be a factor

You keep dancing around these issues instead of confronting them. I think that is because you, deep down, well know that these colleges are wrong for their discriminatory policies and practices.

 

[Derec]

You obviously have no idea what legacy admissions are all about.

I know what they are about - to give an advantage to the kids of alumni. And since (due to race preferences) there are many blacks at Harvard, their kids are eligible for legacy admissions.

They are, and have been for 100 years.

You exemplify a common affliction among left-wing race warriors. You all want to talk about what was happening in the past, not what is happening today.

And now that the Supreme Court’s right-wing white contingent has thrown out affirmative action, whites will be doubly aided, as they were before affirmative action began.

Wrong. SCOTUS has ruled admissions should be race-neutral (except for Roberts' essay loophole). And the biggest beneficiaries will be Asian students. You keep ignoring their very existence!

But if affirmative action violates equal protection, how can it be that legacy admissions do not?

Race is a protected class. Whether your parents went to university X is not.
I see legacies as a far less of a problem than race preferences. A particular student may have a legacy advantage at two schools at most. Maybe his dad went to Harvard and his mom to UMass Amherst. That's advantage at one school, as Amherst does not offer legacy privileges. But a black student has racial advantage at 1000s of colleges practicing race preferences. So, tell me, which is the bigger problem?

The practice of giving admission preference to legacy applicants has a long history, extending back to the 1920s, when some colleges began to use the practice as a backdoor strategy for limiting the number of Jewish, minority and immigrant students by giving preference to alumni’s children who were seldom Jewish, people of color or immigrants.

And schools like Harvard are using "personality scores" today as a backdoor strategy to limit the number of white and especially Asian students. The particular tool that is being misused is far less important than the racist strategy.

 

[pood]

You exemplify a common affliction among left-wing race warriors. You all want to talk about what was happening in the past, not what is happening today.

LOL. You mean like having a white supremacist psycopath as president for four years? OK, that’s not today — it was ja few years ago, granted.

Meanwhile, here is an example of how legacy admissions and racism against blacks works in the real academic world.

 

[Derec]

LOL. You mean like having a white supremacist psycopath as president for four years? OK, that’s not today — it was ja few years ago, granted.

You are getting tiresome. As is Pharyngula ever since PZ went all far-left political.
The fact is that even with legacies, black students admitted to Harvard are scoring on average 41 point less on the SATs.
That is the result of blatant racial discrimination that will now hopefully end. But I am sure the wokesters running many colleges will try to keep discriminating against whites and Asians. PZ is quoting the Vassar president and UMN provost directly saying that they plan to continue discriminating.

 

[ZiprHead]

LOL. You mean like having a white supremacist psycopath as president for four years? OK, that’s not today — it was ja few years ago, granted.

You are getting tiresome. As is Pharyngula ever since PZ went all far-left political.
The fact is that even with legacies, black students admitted to Harvard are scoring on average 41 point less on the SATs.
That is the result of blatant racial discrimination that will now hopefully end. But I am sure the wokesters running many colleges will try to keep discriminating against whites and Asians. PZ is quoting the Vassar president and UMN provost directly saying that they plan to continue discriminating.

What are the scores of white legacies?

 

[laughing dog]

LOL. You mean like having a white supremacist psycopath as president for four years? OK, that’s not today — it was ja few years ago, granted.

You are getting tiresome. As is Pharyngula ever since PZ went all far-left political.
The fact is that even with legacies, black students admitted to Harvard are scoring on average 41 point less on the SATs.
That is the result of blatant racial discrimination that will now hopefully end. But I am sure the wokesters running many colleges will try to keep discriminating against whites and Asians. PZ is quoting the Vassar president and UMN provost directly saying that they plan to continue discriminating.

Can you provide those alleged quotes or a link to them?

I ask, because Elizabeth Bailey (Vassar President's) wrote

In closing, Vassar has faced challenges before, and we will not be daunted in our mission to bring together diverse communities of learning, while following the law." (source: (Vassar President Comments on SCOTUS decision )

and

In a statement from the University of Minnesota Provost, Rachel Croson said the school is working to "ensure that our processes in undergraduate, graduate, and professional education are compliant with the new state of the law and that we continue to live out our values of inclusion and access." (source: U of Mn reaction to SCOTUS decision )

which seems to me to directly contradict your claims.

 

[CosmicJellyfish]

You exemplify a common affliction among left-wing race warriors. You all want to talk about what was happening in the past, not what is happening today.

Decent people who aren't right-wing dickheads recognize that the past shapes the present and that centuries of racism tends to leave long lasting scars. Right-wing shitheads like to tell themselves that you can pass a few civil rights laws and solve racism overnight.

race-neutral

There's nothing racists love more than "race-neutral". "Race-neutral" cannot exist in a society built on racial hierarchy.

Poll taxes in the United States - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Grandfather clause - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Literacy test - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Exclusionary zoning - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

IRS admits Black taxpayers are more likely to get audited

Research shows that Black Americans face audit rates that are up to five times higher than those of other racial groups.

www.cbsnews.com

The simple fact that colleges charge tuition in a nation with vast racial wealth disparities renders the notion that college can be race neutral laughable.

A close examination of wealth in the U.S. finds evidence of staggering racial disparities. At $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) in 2016. Gaps in wealth between Black and white households reveal the effects of accumulated inequality and discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception. The Black-white wealth gap reflects a society that has not and does not afford equality of opportunity to all its citizens.

Examining the Black-white wealth gap | Brookings

A close examination of wealth in the U.S. finds evidence of staggering racial disparities.

www.brookings.edu

And the biggest beneficiaries will be Asian students.

Opinion: Affirmative action isn't hurting Asian Americans. Here's why that myth survives

The idea that Asian Americans need higher SAT scores than others to get into Harvard is a fallacy based on a misreading of a study that didn't look at other admissions factors.

www.latimes.com

Asian Americans Support for Affirmative Action Increased Since 2016 - AAPI Data

The majority of registered voters among all Asian American groups surveyed supported affirmative action in 2020, and the direction of the trend since 2016 is positive

aapidata.com

69% of Asian American Registered Voters Support Affirmative Action - AAPI Data

In spite of racially charged campaigns by opponents of affirmative action that have portrayed Asian Americans as adversaries, a strong majority of Asian American registered voters supports the policy in university admissions. Moreover, Asian American support has remained stable and high for...

aapidata.com

Chinese For Affirmative Action’s Statement on the Supreme Court’s Decision in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina - CAA

San Francisco, CA — Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) expresses frustration and disagreement with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn race-conscious admissions in both the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina affirmative action cases...

caasf.org

 

[pood]

LOL. You mean like having a white supremacist psycopath as president for four years? OK, that’s not today — it was ja few years ago, granted.

You are getting tiresome.

Likewise, I’m sure.

As is Pharyngula ever since PZ went all far-left political.

Pure ad hom. P.Z. is wrong because he’s far left-wing. And you’re right because — why? You’re far right-wing? Right-wing being the default “correct” position? So, two logical fallacies in one short post: ad hom and question-begging.

Funnily, you did not address the examples P.Z. gave. I am sure many more could be adduced.

The fact is that even with legacies, black students admitted to Harvard are scoring on average 41 point less on the SATs.
That is the result of blatant racial discrimination that will now hopefully end. But I am sure the wokesters running many colleges will try to keep discriminating against whites and Asians. PZ is quoting the Vassar president and UMN provost directly saying that they plan to continue discriminating.

You, like so many others, endorse the premise that affirmative action means unqualified black applicants are being admitted to colleges over better-qualified white people. You have never supported this premise, and accepting it without demonstrating its truth is a second fallacy of circularity. So. now we’ve got three logical fallacies in your post.

You dismiss legacy admissions as of little import. Why? The vast majority of those admissions are obviously white people, for the simple reason that far more white applicants have legacies to fall back on than black applicants. Therefore legacy admissions are clearly not the color-blind process that you claim to support. It’s just what I called it, affirmative action for white people, but neither you nor the Supremes want to say boo about that.

Clarence Thomas talks about how he he slapped a 12-cents sticker from a cigar package on his Yale law degree to indicate its actual worth. Why? Because he was admitted to Yale under affirmative action, and discovered later, after obtaining his law degree, that many in the legal profession discounted its worth because of how he was admitted to Yale. So Thomas gets the pubic hair on his Coke can in a twist, not against racists who wrongly believe his degree was worthless because of how he was admitted, but rather against affirmative action itself, which he bootstrapped all the way to the Supreme Court! Wow, Clarence, cry me a river about your difficult life!

 

[pood]

J.J. in Richmond gets it exactly right (first letter in the Sunday mailbag).

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What do you mean by ‘inferior degrees?’

On one hand you acknowledge that it will now be easier to discriminate in favor of the wealthy but then you go say ( as you have in the past) that schools use affirmative action to discriminate (in favor of of minorities.). Can you explain?

When you water down the classes you water down the value of the credential they get for completing the classes.

What is your data that supports that dispensing with SAT and ACT as part of the admissions process will cause universities to water down their degrees?

Pay attention!! I was talking about the watering down of classes that has been mentioned in this thread.

Watered down admissions do hurt because it leads to pressure to water down the testing to avoid flunking out too many people, but it's not what I was responding to.

In another post, you assert that dispensing with the ACT will favor the wealthy. Are you asserting that wealthy students are less well prepared than not wealthy students? Because that seems like a remarkable shift from your earlier positions in other threads about the SAT.

I'm saying that tests are harder to game than other criteria being used. You're not looking at it from an adversarial point of view.

 

[laughing dog]

What do you mean by ‘inferior degrees?’

On one hand you acknowledge that it will now be easier to discriminate in favor of the wealthy but then you go say ( as you have in the past) that schools use affirmative action to discriminate (in favor of of minorities.). Can you explain?

When you water down the classes you water down the value of the credential they get for completing the classes.

What is your data that supports that dispensing with SAT and ACT as part of the admissions process will cause universities to water down their degrees?

Pay attention!! I was talking about the watering down of classes that has been mentioned in this thread.

Watered down admissions do hurt because it leads to pressure to water down the testing to avoid flunking out too many people, but it's not what I was responding to.

Professors have been complaining about the lower quality of the students for many DECADES. Adjusting curriculum to deal with the abilities and knowledge of the audience was going on when the SAT and ACT were ubiquitiously used. Eliminating their use will have little effect on "watering down".