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So for fact sake, search the economist. And the And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

My name is Rob Henderson. I'm a PhD student in psychology at Cambridge University and a graduate of Yale University, but before I entered higher education, my life was a lot different.

I recently wrote an essay that appeared in persuasion titled

Don't End Aptitude Tests. In that piece, I wanted to question a popular opinion that standardized testing has a detrimental effect on the

prospects of poor and disadvantaged students.

I'm sort of a beneficiary of standardized tests despite my unusual upbringing.

In that piece I highlighted that it has become somewhat fashionable to believe

that these kind of standardized tests are harmful to kids who grew up like I did. My mother was a drug

addict and my father had abandoned us and I spent my early childhood living in foster homes in Los Angeles and was generally a terrible student and I just had a very negative attitude about rules and about teachers in high school.

I graduated near the bottom of my high school class with a 2.2 GPA.

So I decided to join the military, which requires potential recruits to take the armed services vocational aptitude battery or what's called the

ASVAB, which is a standardized test somewhat similar to the SAT. After I took this test, my military recruiter showed me how to convert my results into an SAT score.

I was surprised to discover that my score was the same as my friend who had always

gotten straight A's and who was heading for college. So the results of that test

was the first inkling that maybe I had the potential to be a good student and I in the future could have maybe sought a path to college.

My academic prospects were not as dire as I thought. So for example, in May of 2020,

...