Affirmative action has gone for a rough ride recently with defeats in both the voting booth and the Supreme Court. So when I first read the headline “Lower Weight of SATs Could Eliminate Need for Affirmative Action,” I was skeptical. “It’s probably just some biased study published to get rid of what’s left of affirmative action in our education system,” I thought.

The debate on affirmative action has traditionally been framed as an “either/or” decision. “Should institutions simply admit college students based solely on academic merit? Or, should they continue to give weight to other factors, especially to actively address the need to ensure racial and/or ethnic diversity?” But a study published in the August 2007 issue of the American Sociological Review by Sigal Alon of Tel Aviv University and Marta Tienda of Princeton University might reshape that debate.

Alon and Tienda’s study suggests that “universities can achieve a diverse campus by using different measures to define ‘merit.’ Relying on SAT (Scholastic Achievement Test) scores as the main measure of merit, as is the current norm, does not achieve the desired diversity. But, if universities place more weight on performance-based measures of merit, like high school class rank, they can achieve the goal of enrolling a diverse student body while not compromising excellence.”

The sociologists studied the effect of Texas’ “top-10 percent” rule, which stipulates that public universities in Texas ignore test scores in admissions decisions for the top ten percent of each graduating high school class. They concluded that class rank is “highly compatible with achieving institutional diversity and does not lower graduation rates.”

Like the authors, I’m hesitant to generalize these findings to the entire nation. But also like the authors, I hope this study will help reduce the growing emphasis on test scores in admissions decisions. Such an emphasis only further disadvantages the disadvantaged who can’t afford SAT tutors and haven’t been taking test prep classes since middle school. Unfortunately, schools continue to inflate the importance of test scores in a desperate attempt to climb the U.S. News and World Reports rankings. As long as universities put the interests of a magazine which makes millions off of a single issue exploiting anxieties above those of students, we will never achieve equal access to higher education and equal opportunity to prosperity in America.