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University of California dropped SAT even after faculty said it helped minorities
The regents of the University of California spoke as one when they unanimously scrapped the Scholastic Aptitude Test in a virtual meeting last month. “I believe the test is a racist test,” said one…
nypost.com
University of California dropped SAT even after faculty said it helped minorities
By Richard Bernstein
June 18, 2020 | 7:30pm
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The regents of the University of California spoke as one when they unanimously scrapped the Scholastic Aptitude Test in a virtual meeting last month. “I believe the test is a racist test,” said one regent, Jonathan Sures. “There’s no two ways about it.”
But the regents’ decision flouted a unanimous faculty-senate vote a few weeks earlier to retain the SAT for now, after a yearlong study by a task force found the test neither “racist” nor discriminatory and not an obstacle to minorities in any way.
The 228-page report, loaded with hundreds of displays of data from the UC’s various admissions departments, found that the SAT and a commonly used alternative test, ACT (also eliminated), helped increase black, Hispanic and Native-American enrollment at the system’s 10 campuses.
“To sum up,” the task force report determined, “the SAT allows many disadvantaged students to gain guaranteed admission to UC.”
So how could the liberal governing board of a major university system reject the imprimatur of its own liberal faculty researchers and kill a diversity accelerator in the name of the very diversity desired?
The answer: The urgency of political momentum against the tests proved irresistible and swept away the research and data.
Standardized tests were created about 100 years ago by what became the College Board to provide qualified Jews, Italians, Irish and others a better chance of getting into elite institutions dominated at the time by privileged, well-connected, mostly Protestant families. The idea was that the test created a national standard by which all students from all parts of the country and backgrounds could be compared.
But over the years some minority groups have scored significantly lower on the test than others. This has led many educators, civil rights activists and some academics to argue that the tests are racially biased obstacles to the goals of opportunity and diversity.
They say the tests favor affluent families, most of them white, who are able to pay for things like private tutoring and summer enrichment programs of the sort that are out of reach for poorer families. This was the prevailing view among the UC regents.
SAT math scores mirror and maintain racial inequity | Brookings
The math section of the SAT mirrors race gaps—what can we do about it?
www.brookings.edu
n 1926, the SAT was created to give talented students, regardless of income, the chance to compete for college admission and scholarships. Nearly 100 years later, it often excludes the lower-income students it was created to help. Although the original exam was primarily aimed at economic diversity, part of its stated modern mission is to help increase racial diversity, too.
But Black and Hispanic or Latino students routinely score lower on the math section of the SAT — a likely result of generations of exclusionary housing, education, and economic policy — which too often means that, rather than reducing existing race gaps, using the test in college admissions reinforces them.
Mind the gap: SAT math scores
We investigate SAT scores by race using the College Board’s publicly available data for over 2.1 million 2020 high school graduates, with a particular focus on the math section. (This analysis builds on our earlier work on this issue from 2017, “Race gaps in SAT scores highlight inequality and hinder upward mobility.”)
Ember Smith
Research Assistant - Center on Children and Families
ember_smith
The class of 2020 averaged a score of 523 of 800 on the math section of the SAT, slightly below the College Board’s college-readiness benchmark score of 530. (The College Board predicts that the average SAT test taker will earn less than a C in their first-year math course.) The average scores for Black (454) and Latino or Hispanic students (478) are significantly lower than those of white (547) and Asian students (632). The proportion of students reaching college-readiness benchmarks also differs by race. Over half (59%) of white and four-fifths of Asian test takers met the college readiness math benchmark, compared to less than a quarter of Black students and under a third of Hispanic or Latino students. As we show, there are similar patterns for English, but the gaps are not as stark.
