Why do colleges rely heavily on the S.A.T & A.C.T. scores?

The SAT is essentially a reasoning test used to evaluate potential college students in an unbiased way. The SAT, unlike high school academic tests, is not a place to demonstrate accumulated knowledge, and high school alone does not prepare a student for a good score on the SAT. The SAT is neither an IQ test nor a measure of academic potential.
Higher scores on the SAT significantly increase a student’s college options, learning about and preparing to take the SAT is an extremely important part of the college process. Some students have a high g.p.a. but can be bad test takers regardless if they study or not. We all know that many college admissions offices imbue SAT and ACT scores with importance. At schools that are deluged with tens of thousands of applications, numbers matter, so these scores can play an outsized role in admission decisions. That means these scores can affect where individual students get to go to school.
Through my High School experience, teachers told me the SAT would determine a lot of my potential in life. Having been told this, I still feel the ways that it has affected me, and I still remember all of the years it took to undo the feeling of having a test define the rest of your life. Having to apply for fee waivers and the worry related to not scoring "high enough." because of this experience, I didn’t apply to the schools I didn’t think would accept me (based on my grade), and I didn’t even think about them. I applied to the sure shots; got in and only there did I learn how much potential I had. Regardless of whether or not the ACT/SATs are predictors of your success, you’re not considering many other dimensions of an individual.
Yet significant research shows that SAT and ACT scores don’t really tell us anything meaningful about a student’s future, either academically or in