In the early 1980s, Jewish policymakers in Israel, and its heads of universities believed too many students were gaining access to higher education. Israel’s National Institute for Testing and Evaluation(NITE) was established. This institute created, administers and grades Israel’s Psychometric Entrance Test (the Psychometri) the first of which took place in 1983. NITE has touted this examination as comparable to the American SAT: a multiple-choice examination geared towards measuring students’ potential to succeed in college. The criticisms of the exam are strikingly similar (albeit more explicit) to those of the SAT, particularly concerning minority and disadvantaged populations. The one year the Psychometric exam was suspended (2003) with the goal of increasing admissions on the part of lower-income Jewish students, the number of Palestinian candidates qualified to attend Israeli universities skyrocketed. Universities subsequently sought to clamp down on those numbers, raising the minimum age to favor Jewish Israelis who serve in the army and reinstating the test. As universities moved to bring back the Psychometri, Arab members of parliament demanded that the Educational Committee of the Knesset try for at least three years to see the effects, shouting that the Jewish members of the committee were racists and were trying to hide that racism. The Psychometri remained. More recently, the growing numbers of Palestinian citizens of Israel qualified to enter medicine has led right-wing Israeli news sources and politicians to argue that the Psychometri in Arabic must be too easy, or that too much affirmative action must be taking place and that again, Jewish Israelis who serve in the army must not be discriminated against. Scholars have compared education between the U.S. and Israel, particularly the issue of separate educational systems. However, this paper analyzes not only the pedagogical motivations of policymakers but their politics as well. I consider the effects of the Psychometri on Palestinian access to higher education within Israel and the criticisms levied by (and against) Palestinians. Using policy documents, newspapers, statistical reports, and interviews this paper argues that the adoption of American-style methods in schooling opened Israel’s educational policymakers up to similar criticisms faced by their American counterparts: namely that the examination was either too discriminatory or (in effect) not discriminatory enough against minority populations.