Do you know what the stated purpose of the SAT is? The stated purpose of the SAT is to predict a student's first-year college grades. Unfortunately, it fails in this regard. For example, men outperform women on the SATs, but women outperform men in first-year college grades. You'd think that a test that absolutely doesn't do what it says it does would be dismissed as invalid. But the SAT has a stranglehold on the college admission process. It provides a wonderful little number that admissions people at gigantic universities like Ohio State University -- population 50,000 -- can use to screen applicants.

But the SAT is only the tip of the iceberg. The SAT, SAT II, PSAT/NMSQT, CLEP, and AP tests are administered by an organization called The College Board. That's a lot of tests. But the College Board is only one branch of a larger organization called ETS, Electronic Testing Service. ETS also administers the GMAT (business school) and the GRE (graduate school), as well as a dozen other tests.

But then there's the LSAT and the MCAT. The LSAT is administered by the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), and the MCAT is administered by the Association of American Medical Colleges. Both of these organizations exist so that you must pay them in order to get into law school or medical school. You must pay $115 to take the LSAT. Then you must pay $100 more for the "Law School Data Assembly Service," in which LSAC compiles transcripts, letters of recommendation, and LSAT scores and sends them to law schools to which you apply. This is not optional. You're being forced into doing this if you want to go to an accredited law school, and unless you want to spend the rest of your life as a FEMA director[1] or an intelligent design advocate[2], you need to get a degree from an accredited law school.

But it's too bad these tests don't mean anything, either. The LSAT is merely a test of logical reasoning skills. It has nothing to do with law school, beyond the necessity of having reasoning skills, but being able to do logic puzzles doesn't mean you'll succeed at law school. There's a writing portion, but it's unscored and is sent along with your scores to the schools that you apply to.

Did I mention that it's a stupid baby test? Standardized tests don't reflect anything except your ability to take a test. This is because the tests can be "cracked," and there are half a dozen national organizations -- The Princeton Review and Kaplan are the two big ones -- who make a ton of money teaching students how to exploit the flaws and recurring patterns of the test.

[1] Michael Brown, former director of FEMA, got his J.D. (Juris Doctorate) from Oklahoma City University School of Law in 1981. Daily Kos reports that, until 2003, this institution wasn't accredited by the Association of American Law Schools. The problem with this is that "[m]ost prospective law students won't even consider applying to a non-AALS law school unless they have no other option, because many employers have a policy of not considering graduates of non-AALS institutions."

[2] Intelligent design advocate Dr. Kent Hovind received his Ph.D. in Christian Education in 1991 from Patriot Bible University, an un-accredited Bible college in Colorado Springs which was, at the time Hovind received his degree, "a ministry of Hilltop Baptist Church." Patriot University, like Bob Jones University, maintains that accreditation is mostly for show and doesn't mean anything. Hovind has claimed to have a Ph.D., not a J.D., but I include him here anyway because I don't like him.