In the span of 117 seconds, the national conversation about standardized tests changed, perhaps forever.
The University of California’s Board of Regents on Thursday unanimously approved a plan to suspend its ACT/SAT requirement for admission until 2024. In 2025 the system would either introduce a new college-entrance exam for in-state applicants — or eliminate its standardized-testing requirement for all California students.
The move could have far-reaching implications. As the nation’s biggest market for college-entrance exams, the Golden State has long driven higher education’s discussions of the ACT’s and SAT’s benefits and drawbacks. And two former UC presidents — Clark Kerr and Richard C. Atkinson — played key roles in the tests’ evolution.
The UC system’s ground-shaking plan arrives as colleges throughout the nation have been rethinking their own testing requirements because of Covid-19. The pandemic led to the cancellation of ACT and SAT exams this spring, and uncertainty looms over test administrations scheduled for later this year.
And scrutiny of UC’s testing requirement is intensifying. Earlier this week, a California judge ruled that the university could be sued for alleged discrimination against low-income, minority students, as well as disabled applicants, by requiring the ACT and SAT.
After more than six hours of discussion during a videoconference on Thursday, a roll-call vote lasting just under two minutes sealed the UC board’s decision to move away from the ACT and SAT. For a system that has studied — and studied — the impact of its testing policies for decades, the new plan seemed to arrive at the institutional equivalent of light speed.
Just 10 days ago, Janet Napolitano, the system’s president, proposed the multifaceted five-year plan that the board approved. She recommended that the system’s nine undergraduate campuses — which recently suspended their ACT/SAT requirements for fall-2021 applicants because of Covid-19 — remain test-optional through 2022.
In 2023 and 2024, the plan says, UC will adopt a “test-blind” policy: Though applicants could submit ACT or SAT scores, they wouldn’t factor into admissions evaluations. The university would consider the scores only for other purposes, such as course placement, scholarships, and eligibility for the statewide admissions guarantee.
By 2025, the system will “eliminate any use” of the ACT and SAT for in-state students. It will then require a new or modified “content-based test” that would more closely align with what the university expects incoming students to know.
In her proposal, Napolitano wrote that the university should adopt an exam that enhances admissions decisions, promotes college access and equity for more students, and “reduces the social and monetary burdens associated with the currently required ACT/SAT tests.”
A Well-Worn Debate
No one could ever call a university board meeting entertaining. Still, though grueling and tedious, this one was, in its own way, dramatic. Minute after minute, the regents plunged themselves into the churning waters of the standardized-testing debate. They sifted through numbers, percentages, and the many well-worn arguments for and against the use of standardized tests as measures of an applicant’s worthiness and potential.
First, the board heard from members of the public, many of whom spoke passionately, reminding their audience that the ACT and SAT aren’t just multiple-choice tests. They’re multiple-choice tests that, for many people, carry tremendous emotional weight.
A senior at the University of California at Los Angeles called the SAT “a racist exam” that hurts black applicants. A member of a college-access group described testing requirements as a “racial- and economic-justice issue.” A high-school student whose parents are immigrants described the nonacademic commitments — such part-time jobs or caring for younger siblings — that can hinder low-income students who are trying to prepare for a high-stakes test that, she said, “overshadows years of hard work.”
Jay Rosner, executive director of the Princeton Review Foundation, which helps underserved students prepare for standardized tests, urged the board to abandon its ACT/SAT requirement. “Please help me,” he said, “switch out of the test-prep business.”
Moments later, an Asian-American student said that dropping “objective measures” would work against the university’s pursuit of equity and would harm Asian-American applicants. Another speaker said that nixing the university’s ACT/SAT requirement would harm underrepresented students: “You’ll be taking away the primary way they have to prove they’re extraordinary.”
The day’s most eloquent speaker was Varsha Sarveshwar, who graduated this spring from the University of California at Berkeley. She described growing up in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles where prepping for the SAT was “an extracurricular activity of its own.”
Sarveshwar, the departing president of the University of California Student Association, said she had benefited from private tutoring that raised her SAT score nearly 200 points, to 2320 (on the old 2400 scale). Her family’s financial circumstances, she said, had helped her succeed on the exam. “Self-studying takes a lot of initiative,” she said. “When you pay for test prep, you pay to turn standardized tests into a class.”
Many underrepresented-minority students, Sarveshwar told the board, don’t have that luxury.
What Changed in 3 Months
Hours of intense discussion ensued. Several regents referred repeatedly to the findings of a panel appointed by the University of California’s Academic Senate. In February that faculty panel delivered a long-awaited report examining the system’s standardized-testing requirements. The bottom-line recommendation: The university, at least for the near future, should continue to require the ACT or SAT for admission.
Napolitano said on Thursday that she agreed with several of the panel’s conclusions. The university’s admissions processes, she said, would work better with standardized tests than without them. She concurred with the panel’s conclusion that the ACT and SAT have limitations: “We can and should use tests that better meet our own standards.”
In the end, though, Napolitano said she didn’t buy the panel’s finding that UC’s institutions were able to mitigate the effects of the ACT and SAT requirement on underrepresented-minority students, who on average have lower scores than white and Asian-American students do.
“I was unpersuaded,” she said, “that the value-add of the SAT and ACT to our admissions process was sufficient to outweigh all of the extensive mitigation measures we employ to counteract the effect of standardized tests on certain populations, specifically to counteract the correlation between the SAT and ACT to the socioeconomic level of the student, and, in some cases, the ethnicity of the student.”
George Kieffer, a regent, said that Napolitano’s recommendations were “fundamentally inconsistent” with the panel’s recommendations. He cast his vote for her proposal just the same.
Sherry L. Lansing, another regent, expressed concern that a new test would have the same flaws as existing exams: “Any new test will be subject to the same problem of people paying to prepare for it or in some way getting advantages.”
She also raised concerns about the cost of creating a new exam. “At this particular time, as a university, we cannot afford, with Covid, to spend $100 million on a new test,” she said.
Napolitano disputed the notion that the development of a new exam would cost that much. “Let’s take the next six months and work up a feasibility study,” she said. “If the feasibility study shows it’s not feasible, that’s the end of the question.”
“OK,” Lansing said, “but it’s money. It’s money in a very crisis time.”
Lark Park, a regent, described her concerns with the faculty panel’s focus on the predictive value of ACT and SAT scores.
“My first reaction was, Wow, we must be really doing something wrong,” she said. “I thought higher ed was really about you take people who are there, put them in the intellectual life of the university, filled with curiosity and research opportunities, and that really ignites something in people that is motivating and life-changing whether you have a high SAT score or a low SAT score.”
“This reliance on predictive value,” she said, “is implying ‘smart in, smart out,’ and ‘smarter in, smarter out.’ That troubles me deeply.”
‘The Public Good’
Despite the regents’ many concerns, they all sounded more or less swayed in the end. The gravity of a national crisis, the volume of internal data compiled over many years, the relentless assessments of the university’s testing policies — perhaps it all made the outcome of the vote inevitable as the discussion veered into its sixth hour.
“We have been talking about this for decades,” one regent said of cutting ties with the ACT and SAT. “The time is now.”
John A. Pérez, the board’s chair, had the last word. The proposal, he said, would help the university align its admissions policies with “the public good.”
He then described his understanding of the question before the board: “Whether we want to be agents of adding equitable considerations to how we admit people. … whether we want to slow-walk or create urgency in creating better equitable outcomes in our admissions process.”
In a written statement, the College Board responded to the board’s vote to cut ties with the SAT. “Regardless of what happens with such policies, our mission remains the same: to give all students, and especially low-income and first-generation students, opportunities to show their strength. We must also address the disparities in coursework and classrooms that the evidence shows most drive inequity in California.”
ACT Inc., which own the ACT exam, did not respond to a request for comment late Thursday.
In a May 18 letter to the Board of Regents, Marten Roorda, ACT’s chief executive, wrote that Napolitano’s plan would “further the uncertainty and anxiety of students and their families at a time when they need all the reassurances and resources we can provide.” The proposal, he added, would “strain admissions offices, state budget, and the broader education system, creating more questions and concerns about fairness, equity, comparability, and reliability that will make admissions much more subjective.”
In a written statement, Robert A. Schaeffer, interim executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, said his organization “expects many colleges and universities now in the process of evaluating their own admissions-testing mandates to heed the message from California and adopt ACT/SAT-optional policies.”
Though bold predictions abound, some caution is in order. The UC system, though dealing a blow to testing companies, plans to replace two standardized exams with another. It remains to be seen what that exam will look like or what its inevitable flaws will be.
So nobody should write a eulogy for the ACT and SAT, at least right now. And, no, dropping a testing requirement doesn’t guarantee that any university can or will enroll more low-income and first-generation students.
But, yes, the status quo in college admissions just shifted.
