Among the challenges of COVID-19, one positive change has emerged. The University of California is now test-blind in admissions. Students no longer submit SAT or ACT scores with their applications.
Many tech leaders, venture capitalists and others who scored highly on tests are criticizing this decision. Critics argue standardized tests provide an objective comparison of students and enable poor students to rise above substandard schooling.
Testing and college admissions experts hold a different opinion. The SAT and ACT are not objective, do little to predict college success and have historically hurt marginalized students.
Many defenders of the tests ignore that colleges first implemented the SAT to exclude Black students. The College Board requested eugenicist Carl Brigham create the test after reviewing his racist book “A Study of American Intelligences,” in which he proclaimed Black people intellectually inferior. The test was never intended to help underrepresented groups.
The University of California added tests to manage growing applicant pools. The tests have been very successful at this. The UCLA admissions rate was 74% when New York University professor Scott Galloway was admitted in 1982. Last year, it was 4%. The SAT and ACT disproportionately eliminate promising low-income students, as test scores correlate far more with parental income than high school GPAs, the best predictor of college success.
Tests are less predictive than GPAs because they are biased and measure a sliver of the skills needed for college. Many people don’t understand how tests can be biased. Everyone takes the same test. It consists of math, logic and reading questions. How can the scores not be objective?
Test questions reference the world we live in, and students have very different lives. For example, a test question referencing escalators is much harder for students who have not seen an escalator. The College Board has unsuccessfully tried to remove this bias. Women, bilingual students and Hispanic students score lower on the tests than their high school performance predicts, and then perform better in college than their scores predict. Removing bias is very difficult.
The tests only measure a few skills under time pressure, and miss many skills needed for success, such as synthesizing data, crafting arguments and persistence. My first physics professor started class by sharing how he won the Nobel Prize, despite having average SAT scores. He stated that curiosity, creativity and persistence were more important than test scores in becoming a world-class physicist.
Test defenders suggest we address score differentials through increased school funding and more test prep for low income students. These solutions do not address the inherent problems of using a standardized test as a major factor in admissions decisions.
If you push, test defenders question how we will decide which students should receive coveted admissions spots if we rely on GPA. There are many students with great GPAs. Essays and extracurriculars are inequitable. Doesn’t a test help us differentiate a “rigorous” GPA from an “easy” GPA? Tests don’t do this. Colleges evaluate schedule rigor, but the better question is why are we so eager to limit access to opportunity?
The California Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960 was a visionary restructuring of higher education. It guaranteed the top 12.5% of high school students free enrollment in the University of California, at a time when less than 10% of students went to college. It vastly increased opportunity. Our investments in higher education were unprecedented. It made California a center of innovation and helped propel it to the fifth-largest economy in the world.
Instead of doubling down on success, we have been disinvesting and fighting over which students should get access. Over the last 50 years, California’s higher education budget (UC and state universities) has decreased from 14% of the state budget to 5%. By comparison, our corrections budget more than doubled, from 4% to 9%.
We should not ration access to education. The elimination of the SAT and ACT is a step in the right direction, as well as the recently announced addition of 20,000 spots in UC schools. Make this the beginning of a massive reinvestment in higher education for a stronger California.
Jennifer Silva is a Sausalito resident and the former CEO of Sheet Music Plus.
