Today the trustees of the College Board are expected to adopt radical changes to the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a tool that has been used for 76 years by colleges and universities to evaluate applicants. These changes represent a lowering of standards as well as a reduction in the objectivity of a test that has proven to be useful in American education. The College Board, as a private organization, is certainly entitled to make its business decisions. But let the buyers beware that this one results from political pressure. It comes, in this instance, from the president of the University of California, Richard C. Atkinson, who in the service of circumventing his state’s Proposition 209, which bans racial preferences, has tried to find alternate means of sustaining minority enrollment in California’s public universities — alternate, that is, to the state improving its public high school system.

Mr. Atkinson threatened last year that the University of California, the College Board’s biggest client, was considering replacing the SAT I with subject-based achievement tests such as the ACT or SAT II. So now, students will likely be asked to write essays in a twenty minute period, which will be scored en masse by a room full of scorers able to spend only minutes on each essay in a mountain of tests. According to Wayne Camara, vice president of research for the College Board, essays will be scored on factors such as the range of sentence types and the preciseness of the language. Efforts to game the system are sure to grow, especially by students who take test preparation courses. In the meantime, the controversial analogies section — long since purged of much ridiculed questions regarding yachts — is poised to meet its maker. It’s a shame. A section that tested vocabulary and abstract thinking will be replaced by one that may measure nothing.