Last year, the University of California’s (UC) Board of Regents voted to eliminate the requirement for applicants to take two SAT subject tests. Effective 2012, applicants with a GPA of 3.0 or higher who’ve completed at least 11 of 15 required college prep courses by their junior year and taken the ACT with Writing or SAT Reasoning (SAT-R) exam will be considered for admission.
The Center for Equal Opportunity‘s Linda Chavez informs readers that UC has changed the standard again. “Now [the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools] is taking aim at the SAT directly. What makes the action more suspicious is that BOARS’ own report notes that the SAT-R was developed specifically in response to testing principles it promulgated and that the new test ‘adds significant gains in predictive power of first year grades at UC.’ Nonetheless, BOARS is now recommending that students forgo the SAT in favor of the less-popular ACT. [emphasis added]
“Both tests have been accepted for more than 30 years and do a good job of predicting first-year grades. So why is BOARS now signaling preference for one test over another? After reading the report, it’s hard to come away without feeling that the real target is standardized testing in general…It’s not too far-fetched to wonder whether BOARS’ effort to discourage students from taking the SAT may be the first step in getting rid of standardized tests altogether.”
That’s exactly right, Ms. Chavez. When schools slouch toward eliminating standardized tests, it’s typically because racial minorities tend to score lower on standardized tests. When admissions officers assess applicants under an objective standard, the pattern is obvious; hence, racial preferences and a subjective eye to compensate for the deficiencies.
We agree on the solution to the disparity problem. Watering down tests and lowering standards for racial minorities are not the way to go. The solution involves “improving the skills of those students who lag behind,” and that’s a tougher proposition, because it involves parents taking a tough stand and students finding and maintaining motivation. Holding someone to a different standard, especially based on his/her skin color, does not motivate.
Chavez reminds us that it’s illegal in California to grant preferences to and discriminate against individuals or groups on the basis of race in government hiring, contracting, and admissions. Since the law passed in 1996, the state government has attempted to get around it. In fact, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill last year that blatantly violated the law. (See Schwarzenegger Signs Racial Quota Bill) The bill directs state departments to award government contracts to the lowest responsible bidder subcontracting 15 percent of the work to minority-owned businesses and five percent to female-owned businesses. The contractor who fails to do so will be rejected, even if he’s the lowest bidder.
Always lowering standards, never raising. Few people seem concerned about this hair-trigger reaction in academia and in the workplace. To pro-preferences folks, the offense lies not in the thing, but in speaking against the thing. Backward.
Chavez wraps up on a good note:
“What [UC Berkeley and UCLA] failed to notice is that black and Latino enrollment system-wide is up over the levels when racial preferences were common,” Chavez writes. “The students now enrolled under more race-neutral standards are doing just fine, graduating in higher percentages than they were when racial preferences admitted many students to campuses where they couldn’t compete with their peers because their grades and test scores were substantially lower.”
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