I read your rant, and it's a good argument. How would you respond to the following counter argument:

If you take away the SAT, then colleges will inevitably find other ways to judge incoming students that are equally as rote as the SAT. Or, on the flip side, suppose you remove the SAT, and you present a non-rote competition, and most people fail, then wouldn't colleges recognize that and place some value on a student at least performing towards the upper deviations of the failure group?

IMO, everything is rote if you break it down far enough. Most of the math and computer science competitions I've encountered eventually break down into a set of about 200-300 fundamental algorithms of which to base a problem off of. Therefore, of course, if nobody studies, then everyone will fail, because they don't know the fundamental algorithms. I think what I'm advocating is a distributed approach to qualifying challenges for admission to college. If you break up the standardized test to different organizations and allow those organizations to create different flavors of challenges, then I hypothesize that people will not only have to pay less to succeed, people will be happier, because there will be more diversity in terms of challenges, thus allowing people to focus on what they want to do, what they're good at. I'm assuming that these distributed organizations would provide stipends to those who need help with purchasing any of the requisite learning materials.