A good grade-point average won't get you into the nursing program at Cuesta College, a community college in California. No, requiring good marks is an "artificial barrier" to nursing progress, according to the state's community-college chancellor, so admission to the program is now by lottery. A working woman named Judy Downing didn't make the program, though she studied hard at night school and got straight A's in the required courses. But some candidates with C averages won the lottery and got in.

This is just one sign of the gathering assault on good grades, test scores, and nearly all known indicators of merit and academic achievement. Some of this is coming from a philosophy of radical egalitarianism (people must be treated as equal in all matters, regardless of talent or competence). But most of it has been drummed up to protect the excesses of an affirmative action movement in deep trouble with the courts and the American people.

Some examples: Lani Guinier has called for a lottery to determine admission to colleges, after minimal qualifications have been met by applicants. The president of the American Bar Association started a pilot project to de-emphasize the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). A few colleges are abandoning use of the SATs, and the Clinton Department of Education is investigating whether the University of California is violating antidiscrimination law by using test scores for graduate school admissions. Texas now bypasses testing by admitting into the state university system the top 10 percent of students from all high schools, including schools where a large percentage of students can barely read or write.

It's a boat race. Education journals regularly carry attacks on merit and tests. (Sample: Change magazine's article "Standardized Testing: Meritocracy's Crooked Yardstick.") The New York Times, an unfailing barometer of political correctness, ran a long Page 1 article finding (surprise!) "wider sympathy" and "gathering data" calling the SATs into question. The Times revived the old charge of "cultural bias" on the SAT, as demonstrated by the test's use of the word "regatta." (Unmentioned by the Times: The test is endlessly combed for possible bias, and "regatta" hasn't appeared on a test since 1974.).

Colleges can no longer get around the Supreme Court's Bakke decision by pretending that race is just one factor in diversity admissions. We now know too much about how those admissions really work, and the courts have upheld Proposition 209 in California and the Hopwood decision in Texas, a reverse-discrimination suit. So an effort is underway to circumvent or discredit all objective criteria for admissions.

The SATs in particular are under heavy attack because they consistently show 200- to 230-point gaps between test scores of whites and blacks. The argument is that the tests can't be any good because not enough blacks and Latinos do well on them. But attacking the tests is like attacking thermometers because of cold weather. A ton of data tells us that they are merely reporting the truth--that depressingly large numbers of non-Asian minority-group members arrive at college too poorly prepared to do well. When used as they are now (on a weighted basis with grades and other criteria), "the scores are the most reliable known predictor of academic success," as legal writer Stuart Taylor Jr. recently wrote in a long analysis of the SAT issue.

Defenders of preferences now attempt to discount tests and grades by arguing that affirmative-action students do just about as well as better-qualified students. One such study of law schools rippled through the media all year, hailed by NBC's Tim Russert ("blacks who were admitted under affirmative action performed just as well as whites"), Time ("graduation and bar-exam pass rates similar to whites"), and Newsweek ("no real difference in either graduation or bar-passage rates").

Well, not exactly. The study by educational researcher Linda Wightman carried the telltale title, The Threat to Diversity in Legal Education, and muffled the negative evidence it found--21.9 percent of black law students entering schools in 1990-1991 failed to get a degree, compared with 9.7 percent of whites. Far from showing that blacks admitted under affirmative action did just as well as strongly credentialed blacks, Wightman found that blacks admitted under racial preferences were about three times more likely to drop out. And the affirmative-action group had a shockingly high attrition rate--43.2 percent either didn't finish law school or didn't pass the bar.

The "just as well" school of reporting reflects desire more than fact. People who defend preferences want what nearly all Americans want, a country in which no group is left behind. But they have fallen into a no-win strategy by fudging evidence and attacking all academic qualifications to cloak what is really happening. That attack, Taylor says bluntly, will descend on "every objective measure of cognitive capacity or academic achievement that has ever been devised, or ever will be, until more black and Latino children get decent educations in their early years." Sad, but probably true.