Kaplan Test Prep

The major Sacramento newspaper published an opinion piece about CSU/UC's ditching of the SAT/ACT for admissions, focusing on SAT test prep:

I’m 60, and anyone my age or so who was once college-bound probably recognizes the name Stanley H. Kaplan. He founded Kaplan Inc. to help students prepare for the Scholastic Aptitude Test, known as the SAT...

Kaplan thought that if there were some objective metrics for students seeking college admission, the process would be less influenced by the ancestry or wealth of prospective students. 

The SAT and other tests like it became essential for college admissions thereafter...

As the decades dragged on, the SAT, along with Kaplan Inc., became the preserve of kids who went to solid public and private schools, and who also had wealthy, educated parents who could afford Kaplan’s steep prep course pricing.

I agree that test prep favors those with money.  After all, what's the point of being wealthy if you can't use that wealth to make life better for your family?  But let's not disadvantage the disadvantaged any more than they're already disadvantaged, right?  So what to do?  The author's choice seems to be to support getting rid of the SAT/ACT in university admissions decisions, and to me that's a bridge too far:

Kaplan deserved accolades for his original intentions, which went terribly wrong. Poor kids like he was in 1938 are now better served, judged by more than just surviving a gut-wrenching testing process that doesn’t take the full measure of a student’s potential. 

A biased testing metric just keeps people out, which is counter to the mission of a state university.

That's a lie that refuses to die.  There is no evidence that the SAT is biased, racist, etc.  That some students don't perform as well as others doesn't mean that the test is biased, when the fact that some are better prepared than others is a far more reasonable conclusion.  And yes, preparation should play a very large part in college admissions!

We need objective standards by which to judge who should enter our (taxpayer-funded) universities.  Sure, keep some of the subjective standards, but let's not rule out academic preparation just because we find what it tells about our students to be unsavory.