"SAT scandal shows tyranny of standardized testing"

In Great Neck, New York, a town in Long Island, twenty students have been arrested for their involvement in an SAT testing scandal.  Samuel Eshaghoff and many others have been arrested on criminal charges for impersonating high school students to take the SAT.  The author of the article, Nicolaus Mills, argues that "if colleges and high schools sit back and regard the Long Island scandal as primarily a security issue to be corrected by better policing, they are failing in their mission. They bear a huge responsibility for the degree to which a high score on a standardized test has become disproportionately important for college admission."  To Mills, this is representative of a greater issue in the college admissions process, and that is that high SAT scores are a student's ticket into their first-choice college.  He argues that "this obsessive focus is exactly the opposite of the generous ideal that in 1934 led Harvard president James Bryant Conant to pioneer the use of the SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test, for admission to Harvard. Conant's aim was to find worthy students in schools across the country who were not part of the elite private school system from which Harvard traditionally drew most of its students."  Mills believes that admissions offices should try to more effectively balance an applicant's SAT scores with a more complex look at the overall applicant. 
With the number of applicants to undergraduate colleges increasing rapidly, especially at big-name state schools, admissions officers are left with no choice but to rely on SAT scores and GPA.  There are simply too many applicants to assess for them to spend more time on each applicant.  With this recent scandal, I think that we do need to examine the nature of organizations like The College Board, and how much of an influence their tests are having on college admissions.  Should admissions committee's treat the test with less influence, or should they continue to rely on it heavily as a measure of admission for incoming students?  Some schools are now test-optional, and they continue to admit some of the most intelligent students in the nation.  Maybe the SAT will someday be totally gone.