Even were the tests perfect, rich people and ones with additional free time can take more attempts with reduced cost to themselves and families.
Additionally, tests are extremely time boxed, while actual research work is much more lax. Tests also do not measure cooperation, a crucial thing in real life research and development.
Speed is not necessarily quality, and we don't know how correlated it is.
75 years of test validity research say we DO know how correlated tests are with every conceivable definition of "quality." Your comment suggests you just haven't bothered to look.
Multiple attempts on tests don't help very much. We have 75 years of reliability research to show that. It's not single sample estimation. It's a couple hours to collect A LOT of samples.
Of course, money for tutoring, better schools, and highly-educated parents help with test outcomes and are a barrier to socioeconomic mobility. The basic problem is, random selection aside, no one has proposed a fairer system. Read Animal Farm at some point to see what happens when you have revolutions against an unfair system, without proposing something better to take its place..
But my basic point is you're confusing things YOU don't know with things WE don't know. We know a lot about tests, their upsides, their downsides, and alternatives. It's not like there aren't scientific conferences on this stuff.
And the scientific consensus says they aren't in the same galaxy as ranking 99.9997% to 99.9998%. SAT, for example, is better than grades are predicting first year GPA, but it's still not that great.
My point wasn't about the level of validity. My point about making inane comments. OP claimed we don't know things which we DO know simply because OP hasn't bothered to look.
Your numbers, 99.9997% to 99.9998%, roughly ask whether we can distinguish the second-best student in America from the fourth-best with an SAT.
I'm not quite sure anyone is either using the SAT for that, or claiming it's a helpful tool for that. Indeed, at that level, it's not even clear what ranking even means. If you believe people are using the SAT this way, please point me in their direction.
Again, inane comments aren't helpful for advancing the discussion. We have specific facts and numbers to work from. Trump popularized the art of making up facts on the fly, but it's not one I recommend adopting more broadly.
Harvard, Yale, etc. absolutely are claiming that they can separate the 2000th "best" student who gets in from the 2001st student who doesn't. If they wanted to fill their freshman classes entirely with valedictorians with perfect SAT scores, they have the applicant pool to do that.
My assertion is that there's no way for them to accurately make distinctions that fine. Much more honest to set some bar of "you must be at least this proficient to perform academically at Yale" and then pull names out of a hat containing everyone who meets that standard.
As it stands, the current admissions regime looks designed to reify class privileges in America.
This is thread reads like a Donald Trump speech. AstralStorm claims science doesn't exist, when there are whole conferences. rhino369 fakes up some numbers. And now, you come in making fake claims about Harvard and Yale admissions.
I mean, yes, no one is arguing that the admissions regime isn't there to reify class privilege, but if you're going to try to fix the problem, you can't start with falsehoods, half-truths, or sloppy thinking.
Even were the tests perfect, rich people and ones with additional free time can take more attempts with reduced cost to themselves and families.
Additionally, tests are extremely time boxed, while actual research work is much more lax. Tests also do not measure cooperation, a crucial thing in real life research and development. Speed is not necessarily quality, and we don't know how correlated it is.