Brown University follows MIT and Yale. Is the Ivy League right to revive the SAT

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Yale hopped aboard. Brown joined them this week, and although other Ivies say they’re holding firm on keeping the SAT optional, news reports suggest that Penn, too, might soon be headed back to the future.

It seems increasingly clear that the anti-SAT movement was just a fad. Like many fads, this one had people joining in without taking the time to think things through. The determination to do something about racial injustice was in the air and activists had been campaigning against standardized tests for years. They made an easy target — and once one or two schools dropped them, following along was the path of least resistance.

It’s called the bandwagon effect — the tendency to do what other people are doing without pausing to figure out whether those others are right. The schools now reversing course acted too fast in dropping the tests, without the thoughtful consideration that higher education should exemplify.

This bandwagon effect was first noted in politics, but recent decades have seen a deluge of papers using the theory to analyze the behavior of consumers. Institutions, too, like to climb on bandwagons. A much-cited 2000 study found that firms that adopt trendy management techniques tend to be more admired, even when the innovations don’t yield better results compared to peers. A 2020 literature review shows little has changed.

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Bandwagon thinking is forgivable when people are deciding which sweater to buy or which country to visit. But it’s