College Board president David Coleman added that he wanted to make the test reflect more closely what students learn in high school with the new Common Core standards.

SAT (and ACT) scores are intended to supplement the secondary school record and help admission officers put local data—such as course work, grades, and class rank—in a national perspective.

[94] The College Board announced a partnership with the non-profit organization Khan Academy to offer free test-preparation materials starting in the 2015–16 academic year to help level the playing field for students from low-income families.

Moreover, it has been shown that later class times (8:30 am rather than 7:30am), which better suits the shifted circadian rhythm of teenagers, can raise SAT scores enough to change the tier of the colleges and universities student might be admitted to.

"[106] However, by analyzing their own institutional data, Brown, Yale, and Dartmouth universities reached the conclusion that SAT scores are more reliable predictors of collegiate success than GPA.

[118] A 2006 study led by psychometrician Robert Sternberg found that the ability of SAT scores and high-school GPAs to predict collegiate performance could further be enhanced by additional assessments of analytical, creative, and practical thinking.

[119][120] Experimental psychologist Meredith Frey noted that while advances in education research and neuroscience can help incrementally improve the ability to predict scholastic achievement in the future, the SAT or other standardized tests likely will remain a valuable tool to build upon.

[13] In a 2014 op-ed for The New York Times, psychologist John D. Mayer called the predictive powers of the SAT "an astonishing achievement" and cautioned against making it and other standardized tests optional.

[124] In an article from 2012, educational psychologist Jonathan Wai argued that the SAT was too easy to be useful to the most competitive of colleges and universities, whose applicants typically had brilliant high-school GPAs and standardized test scores.

[126] After realizing the June 2018 test was easier than usual, the College Board made adjustments resulting in lower-than-expected scores, prompting complaints from the students, though some understood this was to ensure fairness.

[130] In a 2000 study, psychometrician Ann M. Gallagher and her colleagues found that only the top students made use of intuitive reasoning in solving problems encountered on the mathematics section of the SAT.

[131] Cognitive psychologists Brenda Hannon and Mary McNaughton-Cassill discovered that having a good working memory, the ability of knowledge integration, and low levels of test anxiety predicts high performance on the SAT.

Wai identified one consistent pattern: those with the highest test scores tended to pick the physical sciences and engineering as their majors while those with the lowest were more likely to choose education and agriculture.

)[143][144]A 2020 paper by Laura H. Gunn and her colleagues examining data from 1389 institutions across the United States unveiled strong positive correlations between the average SAT percentiles of incoming students and the shares of graduates majoring in STEM and the social sciences.

[150] A 2012 paper from psychologists at the University of Minnesota analyzing multi-institutional data sets suggested that the SAT maintained its ability to predict collegiate performance even after controlling for socioeconomic status (as measured by the combination of parental educational attainment and income) and high-school GPA.

)[40] One of the proposed partial explanations for the gap between Asian- and European-American students in educational achievement, as measured for example by the SAT, is the general tendency of Asians to come from stable two-parent households.

[154] In their 2018 analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, economists Adam Blandin, Christopher Herrington, and Aaron Steelman concluded that family structure played an important role in determining educational outcomes in general and SAT scores in particular.

[158][159] In 2010, psychologist Jonathan Wai and his colleagues showed, by analyzing data from three decades involving 1.6 million intellectually gifted seventh graders from the Duke University Talent Identification Program (TIP), that in the 1980s the gender gap in the mathematics section of the SAT among students scoring in the top 0.01% was 13.5:1 in favor of boys but dropped to 3.8:1 by the 1990s.

[166] Consequently, a higher number of males are found in both the upper and lower extremes of the performance distributions of the mathematics sections of standardized tests such as the SAT, resulting in the observed gender discrepancy.

[165] On the other hand, Wai and his colleagues found that both sexes in the top 5% appeared to be more or less at parity when it comes to the verbal section of the SAT, though girls have gained a slight but noticeable edge over boys starting in the mid-1980s.

[170] Cognitive neuroscientists Richard Haier and Camilla Persson Benbow employed positron emission tomography (PET) scans to investigate the rate of glucose metabolism among students who have taken the SAT.

[178] Other research cites poorer minority proficiency in key coursework relevant to the SAT (English and math), as well as peer pressure against students who try to focus on their schoolwork ("acting white").

[13][20][89] A longitudinal study published in 2005 by educational psychologists Jonathan Wai, David Lubinski, and Camilla Benbow suggests that among the intellectually precocious (the top 1%), those with higher scores in the mathematics section of the SAT at the age of 12 were more likely to earn a PhD in the STEM fields, to have a publication, to register a patent, or to secure university tenure.

[196] Gregory Park, Lubinski, and Benbow gave statistical evidence that intellectually gifted adolescents, as identified by SAT scores, could be expected to accomplish great feats of creativity in the future, both in the arts and in STEM.

[18] Several companies, especially those considered to be the most prestigious in industries such as investment banking and management consulting such as Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, have been reported to ask prospective job candidates about their SAT scores.

[120] This did not stop highly ambitious students from taking them, however,[37][38] as many parents and teenagers were skeptical of the "optional" status of university entrance exams[38] and wanted to make their applications more likely to catch the attention of admission officers.

[37][38] While holistic admissions might seem like a plausible alternative, the process of applying can be rather stressful for students and parents, and many get upset once they learn that someone else got into the school that rejected them despite having lower SAT scores and GPAs.

[39] Moreover, the most selective of schools might have no better options than using standardized test scores in order to quickly prune the number of applications worth considering, for holistic admissions consume valuable time and other resources.

[120] Following the 2023 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States against race-based admissions as a form of affirmative action, a number of schools have signaled their intent to continue pursuing ethnic diversity.

[219] Schools that made the SAT optional therefore lost an objective measure of academic aptitude and readiness,[13] and they will have to formulate a new methodology for admissions or to develop their own entrance exams.