If you were among the many yearning to see the first signs of a test-optional revolution in the Golden State, the news was disappointing.
On Monday a panel appointed by the University of California’s Academic Senate 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 requiring the ACT or SAT for admission.
Critics of college-entrance exams had hoped that the report would recommend that the system stop requiring them, especially after some of the university’s most prominent leaders publicly questioned their value last year. Instead, the panel pumped the brakes, recommending that the university conduct further research on the possible effects of dropping the requirement.
“Such a move,” the report says, “could have significant, unanticipated, and undesirable effects on the profile of matriculating classes.”
The panel’s recommendations are just that. The Academic Senate soon will review the report before submitting a final recommendation to the system’s president, Janet Napolitano, according to a written statement released by her office on Monday. The system’s Board of Regents is expected to make a final decision this spring.
Here are six passages from the report that help explain the panel’s rationale.
“At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high-school grade-point average.”
Though many other colleges have found that high-school grades are the best predictors of first-year grade-point averages on their campuses, the UC panel found the opposite. It concluded that ACT/SAT scores add “a statistically significant increment of prediction” to high-school grades for various student outcomes, such as dropout rates.
It also found that the test scores explained more of the variance in completion rates for low-income and underrepresented minority students. Over the past decade at UC, the report says, “the predictive power of test scores has gone up, and the predictive power of high-school grades has gone down.”
“Do standardized-test scores counterbalance the variability among grading patterns at different high schools?”
Yes, the report concludes, echoing a major talking point that the ACT and the College Board use to defend their respective exams. Several passages suggest that the panel was especially concerned about the weight that high-school grades would carry if the university were to drop its testing requirement. Having just one quantitative measure of academic preparation would be “problematic,” the report says, because of the variance in grading practices among schools, as well as “evidence of grade inflation.”
“Admission tests find talented students who do not stand out in terms of high-school grades alone.”
For decades, proponents of standardized tests have described the “diamond-in-the-rough” phenomenon, in which applicants who otherwise would have been overlooked stand out because — and only because — of their standardized-test scores. “The SAT and ACT,” the report says, “appear to play that role for many students at the UC today.” It cites the fact that about a quarter of all low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented minority students whose grade-point averages were too low to earn them a guaranteed spot were nonetheless admitted because their high test scores met the system’s statewide eligibility criteria.
“This system works as well as it does because [the university] receives both test scores and grades for all the applicants to any UC campus from a given high school.”
The panel described several operational concerns. If some applicants did not submit a test score, the report says, it would hinder the system’s ability to “normalize scores by school and thus to compensate for school-to-school variability in educational quality.”
That pragmatic concern raised an ethical question about how to treat student-score submitters and nonsubmitters fairly. “The current UC admissions practice of putting each applicant’s test scores into context by comparing them to all applicants from the same school, thus allowing readers to identify students who performed exceptionally well given available opportunities,” the report says, “could no longer be used.”
“Large intergroup differences in SAT scores do not translate into major differences across student groups in admission rates at UC.”
The panel suggested that this was the most important finding it had drawn. “For any SAT score,” the report says, “students from disadvantaged groups have a higher probability of being admitted than students from advantaged groups.” In short, the panel expressed considerable faith in how admissions offices use ACT/SAT scores to identify applicants within each socioeconomic group who are most likely to succeed.
The system’s comprehensive review process, which weighs factors beyond grades and standardized-test scores, “effectively renorms” exam scores and helps each campus compare students’ SAT scores within, but not across, socioeconomic subgroups, the report says. That, the panel found, helps to mitigate disparities in test scores.
“This is not to conclude that consideration of test scores does not adversely affect URM [underrepresented minority] applicants.”
The panel acknowledged that the system’s admissions practices do not make up for significant racial and socioeconomic disparities reflected in the university’s enrollment. Perhaps the most striking line in the report sounds like one that a critic of testing requirements might have typed: “If standardized-test scores must be compensated in order to achieve the entering class sought by UC, that is reason to question whether it is necessary to use the tests at all, and/or whether it is possible to design an alternative instrument that does not require such compensation.”
