My guess is that the US used to have objective criteria but because University admissions are so competitive everyone studied just for the test and Universities filled with people who were very good at &quot;book-learning&quot; at the expense of everything else.<p>They wanted students to be more varied, more well-rounded individuals instead of robots who memorize books. So naturally, they started <i>testing</i> for holistic well-roundedness and Goodhart&#x27;s law did the rest.