A New Lawsuit Calls U. of California’s ACT/SAT Requirement ‘Flatly Discriminatory.’ Here Are 5 Things to Know.

Lawyers representing students, college-access groups, and the Compton Unified School District on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the University of California, alleging that its ACT/SAT requirement is “flatly discriminatory.” The lawsuit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, urges the system to stop using the college-entrance exams in all evaluations of applicants.

By requiring the ACT/SAT, the UC system “makes its campuses havens for concentrated privilege,” Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm that’s co-representing the plaintiffs, said during a news conference on Tuesday. “It is illegal wealth and race discrimination that damages the futures of tens of thousands of students each year.”

The plaintiffs contend that the system’s testing requirement violates the equal-protection clause of the California Constitution, as well as several antidiscrimination statutes, by adversely affecting low-income and underrepresented minority applicants and students with disabilities. The bottom-line contention: The UC system has failed to meet its legal obligation to provide “equal access” to all qualified students, regardless of their background, by relying on assessment tools that benefit some groups more than others.

The lawsuit is the first to take direct aim at a college’s ACT/SAT requirement. It arrives as the UC system is once again scrutinizing its reliance on the college-entrance exams. Recently, UC’s Academic Senate established a panel to determine whether the tests are useful measures of academic performance (ACT/SAT scores are among the 14 factors considered in admissions).

The panel’s recommendations, expected in early 2020, could have far-reaching implications for the testing industry. If the UC system, one of the biggest test-consuming customers on the block, were to drop the ACT/SAT, the entire admissions landscape would probably change.

Some of the system’s leaders favor abandoning the requirement. Last month Carol T. Christ, the University of California at Berkeley’s chancellor, said publicly that the ACT and SAT “really contribute to the inequities of our system.”

On Tuesday, Rosenbaum described the litigation as a timely response to widespread concerns about how the admissions process often favors wealthy applicants, who can afford to avail themselves of expensive, high-end test preparation. “This lawsuit,” he said, “is the next chapter in the Varsity Blues scandal.”

The lawsuit might or might not end up changing anything. But either way, the document offers a glimpse of how the testing debate seems to be evolving.

Here are a few key points to consider.

There’s education policy, and then there’s law.

The age-old debate over ACT/SAT requirements has always hinged on questions of fairness. Given the ample evidence that test scores correlate with family income and race, is it fair, as a matter of policy, to use them in high-stakes admissions decisions?

Whatever your answer, that’s different than asking whether or not the use of ACT/SAT scores is, in fact, legal. UC’s testing requirement, the lawsuit alleges, “is not only bad educational policy; it’s unlawful discrimination.”

In short, the scholars, statisticians, enrollment gurus, and testing czars who’ve long shaped discussions of ACT/SAT policies now might have to make more room at the table for legal experts to weigh in.

“Disparate outcomes” is a key term.

Testing companies have long said, in so many words, that the score disparities among various subgroups of test takers reflect inequities in education — and not flaws of the exams themselves. After all, some students grow up with far more opportunities than others, right?

The lawsuit essentially asks a court to consider how the causes of that opportunity gap relate to its effects. That is, how a student’s test score affects her chances of admission, the type of institution she can attend, and even the kind of field she might enter.

One of the plaintiffs’ key arguments is that because ACT and SAT tests result in “starkly disparate student outcomes,” requiring them ensures outcomes that “systematically harm underrepresented minority students.”

Rosenbaum said: “The use of the SAT and ACT wrongs these students for no good reason.”

Student stories stand out.

For decades, the war over ACT/SAT requirements has been waged by data-wielding geeks. Though there’s plenty of important data cited in the lawsuit, it’s front-loaded with human stories.

The document, for instance, describes the experience of Kawika Smith, a 17-year-old plaintiff who has experienced domestic violence and food insecurity. Those circumstances, he said during Tuesday’s news conference, have affected his capacity to perform on the SAT, which, in turn, will surely limit his chances of being admitted to the system’s most-selective campuses.

The details of test takers’ experiences won’t sway everyone, to say the least. But their inclusion in a high-profile lawsuit might help critics of standardized tests reframe the debate in more human terms. After all, defenders of race-conscious admissions policies have gone to great lengths over many years to show a link between data and qualitative accounts of students’ experiences on campuses. And judges have noted the importance of both.

Test prep is kind of a big deal.

Back in the old days, ACT Inc. and the College Board insisted that the only way students could increase their scores on the ACT or the SAT was to learn more content. Now the cat is well out of the testing bag, and just about everyone acknowledges that test-preparation services can help students improve their performance.

But many families can’t afford the top-of-the-line tutors that wealthy families hire. Expect to hear a lot more about that as this case unfolds.

“Unequal access to test-preparation services,” the lawsuit says, “exacerbates the discriminatory nature of the SAT and ACT.”

Test-optional isn’t enough?

Perhaps the plaintiffs’ most striking assertion is that a test-optional policy would not pass muster.

If the UC system were to stop requiring applicants to take the ACT or the SAT, the lawsuit contends, it would still run afoul of state law. Test-optional policies, the document says, “can potentially preserve the structural advantage conferred by SAT and ACT scores on applicants who choose to submit (i.e., higher-scoring applicants who are, as research demonstrates, disproportionately white and affluent).”

That’s why the plaintiffs demand that the UC system stop using SAT and ACT scores altogether. And, no, don’t hold your breath on that one.

On Tuesday the UC system released a written statement in response to the lawsuit: “We are disappointed that plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit when the University of California has already devoted substantial resources to studying this complex issue and has announced the Academic Senate’s Task Force will provide recommendations before the end of this academic year.”

Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.