Challenge Revives SAT Test Debate
In the nine months since the university president, Richard C. Atkinson, proposed that his system stop requiring the main SAT exam, he has brought attention to an arcane debate that was being conducted mostly at gatherings of psychometricians and on small liberal arts campuses.

Unlike those previous conclaves, hundreds of professors and administrators from perhaps the nation's most influential public university system gathered this weekend to discuss what many perceive as the exam's major shortcomings: that it is a distraction to too many high school students, and that it further handicaps disadvantaged students, particularly minority students.

Signaling the broader reach of this gathering, which was titled "Rethinking the SAT," representatives of other state university systems, including those of Washington and New Jersey, as well as from private colleges mostly from the West, joined the conference.

But the end of the test, known as the SAT I, is not yet in sight…
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/education/19EXAM.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all