Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Sternberg

The most revealing thing here is the throat-clearing. "Well" and "I don't think" are the verbal seatbelts of an educator navigating a minefield: the SAT debate is so polarized that even mild defense risks sounding like complicity. Sternberg isn’t thumping the table for standardized testing; he’s signaling measured dissent from the fashionable certainty that the SAT is inherently illegitimate. That restraint is the point.

In context, Sternberg has spent a career arguing that intelligence and merit are broader than what most tests capture. So when he says the SAT isn’t a "scam", he’s not endorsing the SAT as a clean proxy for talent. He’s pushing back against a more corrosive claim: that the test is a deliberately fraudulent apparatus, engineered to deceive. "Scam" implies intent, bad faith, a con. Sternberg’s phrasing quarantines that moral accusation. It reframes the problem from villainy to design limits: a tool can be narrow, misused, or overtrusted without being a con.

The subtext is also institutional: universities and policymakers love the SAT because it standardizes decision-making and protects them from accusations of arbitrariness. Calling it a scam threatens that bureaucratic comfort. Sternberg’s careful negation keeps open a middle lane that’s hard to inhabit online: you can criticize the SAT’s predictive reach, equity effects, and coaching advantages while still treating it as a genuine attempt at measurement, not a racket.

It’s a small sentence that performs a larger cultural function: deflating moral theater in favor of technical disagreement, even when the politics demand a hotter take.