I overheard someone talking about the end of standardized testing in the UC system. She spoke about how hurtful and even traumatic it had been for her to be a good student who "just didn't test well."

She confessed to being a rich white woman (in the way that one does nowadays) and I loved the way she framed it: "If it was so difficult and painful for me, who had every advantage, and the funds to prepare, imagine what it must be like for those who lack my advantages!"

It underscored the extent for me the extent to which any test with a normally distributed outcome that is used as a gateway to a scarce and much desire good reserved for the 98th percentile of scorers will always have a natural constituency opposed to it.

Of course one of the _entire purposes_ of the test is to allow us to identify and to elevate the tiny minority of people of precisely those who lack this woman's advantages but have the ability to outscore her on a test of cognitive ability.

And yet she was able to recast her own anger at being exposed to unpleasant conditions of competition from those more gifted than herself as concern for the less fortunate lacking her advantages. (Which she was of course able to compensate for in life through connections.)

It made me marvel afresh that the testing regime has lasted even this long and that no one has managed to abolish it until now.

Can it be merely coincidental then that this system lost its legitimacy with elites -- at precisely the moments when a critical mass of Asian immigrants began expanding the test gap between themselves and their white counterparts?

While I like pointing out the problems with this system and all the incoherence and gaslighting around the issue, I am not personally a combatant in this fight.

Things can be unfair but my daughter will be fine because she will be equipped with everything she needs whether or not the world is fair.