Standardized tests mainly predict class, not merit, yet became the defended admission criterion.

Evidence

Standardized exams have, if anything, predicted the socioeconomic class of the student and perhaps a student’s first-year success in college or in a professional program—which says that the tests could be helpful for students after they are admitted, to assess who needs extra assistance the first year. And so, on October 12, 1977, a White male sat before the Supreme Court requesting slight changes in UC Davis’s admissions policies to open sixteen seats for him—and not a poor Black woman requesting standardized tests to be dropped as an admissions criterion to open eighty-four seats for her. It was yet another case of racists v. racists that antiracists had no chance of winning. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1066

Categorization

• XREF: Direct application of the reader’s goal: placing this Supreme Court argument into the segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist scheme — Bakke’s side defending test-based admissions is assimilationist at core.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the racists v. racists frame’ — how pivotal race cases pit segregationist against assimilationist while antiracists (like the poor Black woman wanting tests dropped entirely) are structurally excluded from the courtroom.