There were two ways we could have learned about the value of the SAT as a diagnostic tool separating those prepared to do adequately or excel at college-level work and those unprepared to do so. One way to do this would have been to simply accept the findings of the task force of leading academics that the UC system had designated to evaluate this question who submitted an exhaustive investigation in 2020 finding that the SAT was the best predictor of college performance that we have, that it was the best means of finding bright students from poor and minority backgrounds, and that the tests were not biased against minorities. The other way was to get rid of the test in deference to an ideological freakout and see what happened. We did the second thing and learned what every informed observer knew with certainty would happen, thus wasting more than half a decade finding the hard way what we already knew would happen, at the cost of nearly a generation of young people who enter the workforce with inadequate training and skills bearing a degree that has been fatally devalued as a signal of competency for all time.