Faculty: UC should get own entrance exam
The University of California should replace the SAT and ACT admissions tests with its own set of exams — but not for nine years — a faculty committee recommended Monday in response to concerns that the tests put lowincome students of color at a disadvantage.
The task force rejected the idea of making the controversial standardized tests optional as more than 1,000 universities around the country have done in recent years.
The Academic Senate’s 18member Standardized Testing Task Force recommended that UC develop a “suite of high school student assessments” to replace the SAT and ACT, a task that could take UC nearly a decade if the regents adopt the idea.
The committee “believes that it is possible to create fundamentally different kinds of assess
ments that satisfy all (admissions) principles on testing, while retaining predictive power, providing improved feedback to students and teachers, and broadening the demographic range of students UC is able to admit.”
The current tests “measure a relatively narrow slice of academic achievement or potential” late in a student’s high school career, the faculty wrote.
A new system would measure students’ ability over a longer time. It would “be predictive of success at UC, and ... could potentially show smaller disparities than current measures along the lines of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status,” the committee said.
The standardized admissions tests have come under increasing criticism from lowincome students of color and their advocates, who say the exams are biased against students who lack middleclass advantages and unfairly result in worse scores for large groups of testtakers. The students sued UC in December.
UC President Janet Napolitano asked the Academic Senate in 2018 to look at whether UC should make the standardized tests optional. Now, after a year examining data and talking with experts, the faculty committee produced a 192page report with eight recommendations, including keeping the tests — for now.
“It’s clear that there are disparities in test scores,” said Jonathan Glater, a UC Irvine law professor and cochair of the committee. “There are good reasons for critics to point to (these) patterns.”
But dropping the test immediately isn’t the solution, the faculty group concluded.
Instead, UC should provide more academic support services for students and expand the percentage of California high school students who automatically win a seat to the prestigious public university. The committee also recommended that UC look at its admission process for practices that might contribute to ethnic disparities, and continue looking for bias in SAT and ACT test questions.
UC uses the tests in its twostep admissions process. Within California, UC automatically admits the top 9% of students at each high school who satisfy basic UC requirements (though not always to their preferred campus). The university relies on high school GPA and the test scores to determine UC eligibility.
The tests are also among 14 factors UC uses in campus admissions decisions, known as comprehensive review. The faculty also recommended that some of those factors — such as taking courses beyond the minimum required, or taking particularly rigorous courses in senior year — could be added to the first determination of UC eligibility.
The faculty group acknowledged that the “racial and ethnic makeup of the population admitted to the university differs significantly from that graduating from California high schools.”
While 59% of California’s high school students are Latino, black or Native Americans, 37% of California students admitted as freshmen come from those groups. The figure is even lower when non-Californians are included: 26%. On individual campuses, the numbers can be even lower, such as at UC Berkeley, where 18% of all admitted freshmen are Latino, black or Native American.
“The Task Force was concerned about the extent to which standardized tests may contribute to this underrepresentation,” the report said.
But the group concluded that “one consequence of dropping test scores would be increased reliance on high school gradepoint average in admissions,” which it said would be a bigger problem because of grade inflation. “High schools vary greatly in grading standards,” the committee found.
The faculty panel said it also opposed making the SAT and ACT optional because of “pragmatic concerns” about how to fairly compare applicants who submitted scores against those who didn’t. Their report said there was concern that without the tests, UC could no longer compare how applicants from the same school performed against each other. Evaluators want to make that comparison because it allows them to compare students against others with similar opportunities.
“Yet this is not to conclude that consideration of test scores does not adversely affect underrepresented minority applicants,” the report found.
Bob Schaeffer, who heads the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which strongly opposes the SAT and ACT, said the recommendations are wrongheaded.
“There is no value in waiting nearly another decade to see whether UC can come up with something less problematic than the SAT,” he said. “Testoptional policies have been proven to work at more than 1,000 institutions both large and small across the U.S.
“If a highly selective, toptier institution such as the University of Chicago can implement a testoptional policy, so can UC campuses.”
The UC regents will make the final decision, expected in May, but recommendations from the professors should strongly influence their thinking. The current recommendations will also evolve as other members of the Academic Senate formally weigh in. Napolitano will issue the final recommendations to the regents.