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The US has 50 different education systems and each of those systems is subject to 3,200 systems of local oversight and quality control. That means a diploma means very, very different things across the 25,000 different high schools in the nation. A national university can never wrap enough factors to adjust for what a given class rank means from each school.
A national standardized test provides a sanity check/talent screen.
And this is feasible for a country of 40 million but not for one of 330 million? Because I think universities in Canada do exactly that. They adjust grades based on the specific high school. A standardized test would help with this. We even have provincial standardized math exams that every grade 12 math student takes, but I've never heard of a university asking for students' results on this test.
Canada's universities draw far more provincial students than similar US universities. McGill gets 47% of it's student body from Quebec where the Frasier institute ranks 468 high schools (with more than 10 students).
Harvard has only 15% of it's student body from any state and they pull from almost all states.
If Harvard and other top US universities were mostly regional schools, a national assessment would likely be unnecessary in the US, because the admissions officers would know the 2500 schools in their region well and they'd only take top students from other regions, but because most US universities are trying to pull the best student body they can from as broad a geographic brush as they possibly can a national standardized test makes things far easier.
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