Surely, you’ve heard of the SAT, a standardized test once widely used by colleges and universities to figure out whether a student applicant is up to the challenges of higher education. Or maybe you haven’t heard of them because our academic betters feared they weren’t fair to the disadvantaged, as worrisome as the whole idea of merit, and they have been disappearing from the scene. Well, let’s say thank you to The New York Times for a front-page story saying, look, some people who know what they are doing have been running exhaustive tests that prove beyond an educated doubt that they work an…