It reminds me of European universities switching from selecting on humanities to selecting on maths a century ago.
The idea was to remove the social upbringing's impact on test scores, as candidates from higher socioeconomic status are heavily advantaged from using a larger vocabulary from birth.
A PhD friend who studied this told me it had no measurable impact. Put aside raising math tutors salaries of course.
I'm from a former socialist european country, and we use grades + standardized tests results to get into most colleges (art, music and acting colleges are an exception, due to obvious reasons). Everybody has to pass a standardized test at the end of highschool, 5 subjects, for most, the first three are slovene (our native language), english (second language) and math + two subjects chosen by the student (eg. physics and sociology, or chemisty and informatics, or whatever).
The colleges just give out rules how to calculate "points" (usually 40% are the grades, 60% is the test score, but some (eg medicine back in my time) require you to choose chemistry or biology as one of your subjects and that is worth 20%, next to 40% for the other ones and 40% for the grades).
Students know those rules, apply for a college they want, finish the year, do the standardized tests, get the results, colleges calculate them into points, and if there are 60 spots for that study course, top 60 students are accepted... you don't even have to wait to get your letter, colleges publish that the cuttoff was 82 points to get accepted, and if you're above that, you're in, if not, you compete in other colleges/programmes that still have open spots left over.
No races, no letters, no subjective stuff, no problems with -isms.
Grades for each subject are calculated into end-of-year grades (for that subject), and a final "total" grade is calculated (some special formula, not a pure average). A mix of those is then calculated into those 40%... I can look up the formula, but yeah, the grades are used too.
The idea was to remove the social upbringing's impact on test scores, as candidates from higher socioeconomic status are heavily advantaged from using a larger vocabulary from birth.
A PhD friend who studied this told me it had no measurable impact. Put aside raising math tutors salaries of course.