It’s not a mistake, that’s for sure. I’ll be more blunt since a lot of other comments in this thread beat around the bush: higher education institutes are removing objective admissions criteria so that they can admit less qualified minorities on subjective grounds.
1) They're trying to get ahead of a Supreme Court ruling, which will likely rule Ivies are discriminating against Asian candidates.
2) Elite cultural zeitgeist is in favor of discriminating against Asian and non-elite white candidates.
3) More subtly, the top Ivy admins are overwhelmingly Jewish, and they've likely received push back from Jewish alumni/donors, as Asians have displaced smart-but-unremarkable Jewish candidates. A recent Tablet article alluded to Asians displacing Jewish candidates, which has been an unreported theme in the Ivies over the last 20 years.
Money presumably. There's an extremely strong incentive for educational institutions to spend their long term reputation on short term financial gain by setting high fees and giving everyone a high grade. Basically everyone loves it except people who already graduated.
And maybe employers, but employers tend to do their own tests because of the difficulty of comparing external test results across time and institutions.
Well, on the one hand, student applicants want to feel that "I am not a number, I am a human being."
And admission committees put a lot of time and effort into trying to discern qualities that go beyond some numbers of the page to admit a qualified but diverse student body (for reasons both good and arguably bad or ineffective).
It’s telling we’re seeing testing attacked while these are preserved.