“It’s bad enough that so many colleges premise their merit money decisions on a test score”
Believe me, I’m no fan of this practice…but schools do it in response to market demand. You have to get your reported scores higher if you want to raise your school’s academic reputation and attract better students. This is how paying customers judge the school. If families didn’t use ACT ranges to judge school quality, schools wouldn’t be so incentivized to discount high-scoring students. The only way to change this would be for schools (or state governments that run university systems) to switch to need-only aid systems. I know that NCAA scholarships aren’t going away, but schools can choose to operate like Northwestern and make all non-athlete aid need-only.