Standardised testing: homogenisation or fairness, or both?

On a recent visit to the U.S., I met up with friends who are doing their PhDs in a reputed Social Science Grad School on the East Coast. Almost inevitably, our conversation turned to various Graduate Admission Tests such as GRE, GMAT and TOEFL (the latter being the least feared one). High scores in the quantitative, logic and verbal sections are indispensable to be accepted by American top-notch universities or Business Schools worldwide.
The experience of many schools does not suggest a significant correlation between the scores achieved on the tests and success in the actual studies. Indeed, critics continue to object that standardised testing would give preference to learners by heart over more creative minds. Perhaps entire learning cultures, which have replaced drill with the promotion of independent thinking, are facing disadvantage in the highly competitive race for places at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the like. Importantly, preparation courses for GRE and GMAT are expensive and thus further deepening the class-divide in academia. 
All often heard. My U.S.-based friends, partially coming from Europe where standardised testing is marginalised at universities, found it extremely helpful to refresh their maths skills to share common ground with their programme fellows. Surely, this meant some assimilation towards American standards of testing, but they studied in a U.S. environment after all. What is more, they considered the admission tests to create a level playing field among the very diverse applicants, whose undergraduate grades were hardly comparable. Besides, the results on GRE and/or GMAT are not the only, perhaps not even the dominant yardstick for decisions at any school.
Homogeneity is thus the basis, on which most heterogeneous PhD projects and business careers can arise. In addition, standardised testing remains one of the more objective instruments in admission decisions. Yet in order to select the most suitable candidates, testing should always be one component of a broader and diversity-sensitive evaluation, which includes previous achievements, motivation letters, sample essays, references, interviews and assessment centre exercises. (EK)

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