"too little, too late," SAT.

The College Board recently announced changes to its SAT college entrance exam. Leon Botstein, the president of a selective liberal-arts college, wrote a commentary in Time Magazine about it.
In the article, he states that "the SAT is part hoax and part fraud. It needs to be abandoned and replaced."

An article from CNN outlines these changes. The test change the maximum score from 2400 back to 1600, which no longer includes the essay. It will also stop penalizing for wrong answers. 

The president of The College Board claims that the new test turn away from the focus on tricks and trying to eliminate answer choices, and instead shift towards requiring students to justify their answers.

So what's the problem with these tests?

Leon Botstein claims that high school grades are much better at predicting a students performance in college than the SAT. He labels the SAT as a "bizzare" and "outdated" method, because knowing how to do something in real life isn't defined by the ability to choose the correct answer from a set of options, that may or may not be intentionally misleading. 

He also adds that the new changes will not save the test from it's uselessness. The exam claims that it is objective, but the most statistical pattern that stands out the most is the correlation between high income and high test scores. "The richer one is, the better one does on the SAT." 

I can think of a couple things that might explain this. First, higher income families have access to tutors that can help train students to spot the "tricks" that Botstein referenced. They might also be more expectant to attend college, so they will put more effort into the test. 

Colleges also help keep the College Board's monopoly on testing by using the test to benefit their ranking. Colleges can boost their scores by admitting students with high scores on the test. Botstein says that the victim of this relationship are the students, and "our nation's educational standards."

The test taking requirements currently in place are not realistic ones. I think it would be much more beneficial to find out students academic capability based on real world scenarios. While I attended a private tutor to prepare for the ACT (a similar test), I was shocked by the amount of "tricks" there were for taking the test. For example, questions that begin with a certain phrase are most often answered by "D) none of these." Students that might have the equal or greater intelligence than I do might answer this question wrong because they couldn't pay someone to tell them that. 

I have never taken the SAT, so I can't speak about the test itself. If you have, can you compare it to the ACT, and describe what type of questions were asked? How would you change it to make it less objective?