U California system ends use of any admissions tests

The University of California System – the largest and most prestigious public university system in the United States, which includes such top-tier schools as Berkeley and UCLA – has announced that it will stop using both the Standard Aptitude Test (SAT) and the American College Test (ACT) for admissions and it will not use a test developed in-house either.

This decision announced last week puts the University of California System (UCS), which also includes UC Davis and UC Irvine, in line with approximately 85 other colleges and universities, including Ivy League member Cornell University and the City University of New York, as well as Oregon State University (OSU) and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts.

In an email to University World News laying out the timeline that led to the decision, Joanna McWilliams, communications strategist for UC President Michael V Drake, MD, explained that this past September, a study group recommended against producing an in-house option over “concerns regarding potential bias, moderate predictive power, and the adverse effects of high-stakes testing”, which are the same concerns critics have long made of the SATs and ACTs, both of which are commercial products.

Many of the more than 1,800 colleges and universities that the Maryland-based National Center for Fair and Open Testing counts as being “test-optional”, became so in the spring of 2020 after the COVID-19 crisis that prevented the use of school buildings for testing.

UCS, however, began moving away from using the tests the previous January. Before COVID had become a crisis, the system’s then president, Janet Napolitano (who had been secretary of homeland security under former president Barack Obama), tasked the academic senate with reviewing the tests. A month later, the contentious recommendation to continue using the tests resulted in a number of lawsuits from minority and low-income students, who argued that the tests discriminated against them.

A suit brought by a number of disabled students charged that they were discriminated against “because they will not be able to take them [the tests] with appropriate accommodation during the COVID-19 pandemic”.

By 31 August 2020, when the Superior Court of the State of California issued an injunction preventing the university from using the SATs or ACTs in admissions decisions, the issue had become moot. For, in May, the regents had voted to temporarily suspend the use of the tests.

According to Jon J Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrolment management at OSU in Corvallis, Oregon, and Andrew Palumbo, vice president enrolment management at WPI, because of the importance of the UCS schools and the number of applicants (more than 250,000, a tenth of the nation’s total), California’s decision will affect admissions offices across the country.

“Obviously, California has a right to do inside California whatever it wants to do,” says Boeckenstedt, “but as an outside observer, I’m very much supportive of their move to test-free admissions. And, I think it's going to change a lot of things in the United States, probably, for the better.”

For his part, Palumbo says that since California is a major exporter of students (the third largest number ending up in Boeckenstedt’s state), the UCS’s decision to forgo standardised testing will put pressure on other colleges and universities to move away from testing if they want to attract Californians.

Measurement of aptitude

Unlike the British A-Levels, which are subject (or knowledge) based, the publishers of the SATs and the ACTs claim that tests millions of American high school seniors have taken each year measure “aptitude” – hence the presence of the ‘A’ in the SAT’s name.

The SATs are the lineal descendent of the first IQ tests, which were used to determine which American soldiers in the First World War were “officer material”.

One of the creators of this test was psychologist and eugenicist, Dr Carl Brigham, who feared the dilution of the American White Anglo-Saxon stock by immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, such as the Italians and Jews. He was especially vituperative about the impact of blacks on the nation’s IQ.

“The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro,” he wrote in A Study of American Intelligence published in 1923, about the time he led a team that included other eugenicists in creating the SATs.

When I took the SATs in 1976, the joke going around was that one of the questions began with “Biff owns a yacht,” though neither I nor my friends knew how well this joke accorded with the reason the SAT was created, being a tool to determine admissions, primarily to Ivy League and elite women’s colleges.

In 1926, the first year the test was administered, fully 26% of students applied to Yale University (the alma mater of country club members senator Prescott Bush and his son president George HW Bush and his son president George W Bush) and Smith College, one of the Seven Sisters (elite women’s colleges).

Boeckenstedt provided another example, told to him by a friend who had been tutoring students for the SATs, which went something like this: “You have US$312 in your checking account. You write a number of checks for this amount of money each. How much is left in your checking account?” A student who lived in a low-income neighbourhood turned to Boeckenstedt’s friend and asked, “What’s a checking account?”

Efforts to remove such biases have largely failed. “Despite decades of trying to address complaints about racial and ethnic bias in the SATs, the tests assume a common shared cultural and language background,” says Robert Schaeffer.

“They preference kids who grow up in the culture that the test is based on, which is a white, middle class and upwardly mobile culture. Understanding words like ‘regatta’ and ‘marathon’ assume that students come from similar backgrounds and experiences and use words the same way – when, in fact, they do not.”

In his chapter, “The Case Against the SAT/ACT,” in The Scandal of Standardized Tests (2020), using data from UCS, Saul Geiser concluded that “race has a large, independent, and growing statistical effect on students’ SAT/ACT scores after controlling for other Norm-Referenced Tests and Race-Blind Admissions 15 factors. Race matters as much as, if not more than, family income and parents’ education in accounting for test score differences”.

As the black philosopher and historian Ibram X Kendi, chair of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, says: “The tests have failed time and time again to achieve their intended purposes: measuring intelligence and predicting future academic and professional success. The tests, not the black test-takers, have been underachieving.”

The mathematics side of the SAT has been shown to be biased against women, and not just because it once had a number of questions about sports statistics.

As far back as the early 1990s, the creators of the SATs (the Educational Testing Service, ETS) recognised that because men took the risk of guessing more than did women, the multiple choice test favoured men.

Yet Ann Marie Zolandz, who had worked on test development in the early 1990s, told the newsletter of the American Physical Society in July 1997, while the “ETS is dedicated to developing tests that are as equitable as possible to all groups ... we are operating under the strengths associated with administering large-scale tests at a reasonable cost, which presently means multiple choice questions".

The SAT remains a multiple choice test in which, on average, women score lower than do men despite the fact that women have higher grades in maths on their transcripts.

Asked to explain the failures of the standardised tests to achieve what they purport to be able to do, to a non-American audience, Boeckenstedt pointed first to the fact that the United States does not have a common national high school curriculum.

“Every state sets its own. There are some common core standards that some states have adopted, but really, schools are funded differently. Different states have different curriculums. If you use a textbook in California, it's different than what you use in Texas, because of politics [California is a Democratic or ‘Blue’ state while Texas is Republican or ‘Red’].”

“And so, to think that you can develop a single nationwide test that measures learning or measures ability, or measures some combination of those two, is preposterous on its face.

“I mean, maybe a standardised test like that is valuable when you look at students within the same school building, right, who had largely the same curriculum, the same teachers, the same instructional days, but to compare them from one school to another or one city to another or one state to another just doesn't make sense.”

Further, he stressed, in the United States schools are funded mainly from property taxes. “And so, guess who has the greatest advantage with regard to resources and funding in the best teachers and other people? Right, it’s the people from wealthy neighbourhoods,” he told University World News.

Poor predictors of success

Nor are the SATs and ACTs particularly good at predicting college and university success. My English score was somewhere in the low 600s (out of 800), yet I was an honours student throughout college, my masters and PhD. I became an English professor, have written eight military histories and have been a journalist for a quarter century. I was what Schaeffer called a “false negative”.

“There are many false negatives. Meaning, there are test scores that seriously under predict a teenager’s ability to do high level academic work and to be successful in competitive professions,” Schaeffer told University World News.

“What we're talking about here is trying to make a prediction about a teenager [the tests are taken at 17 or 18 years old] going through lots of changes in their lives about where they’re going to end up four years hence or 10 or 20 years thereafter.

“And it turns out there is no superb predictor, but the SATs and ACTs fall short because in addition to the measurement device, they take a snapshot of one set of skills. Success in academia and in other parts of life, require a lot more than being able to choose the right answer out of four in a fast-played, paid, multiple choice, guessing game.”

According to Boeckenstedt, while the standardised tests might tell admissions offices something useful about the top 10% and bottom 10%, they don’t tell you much about the remaining 80%.

“We’re trying to encapsulate something as complex as human learning and human capacity in a three-hour test on a Saturday morning. And, you know, the absurdity of that – and not only that, but boiling it down to one number – is ludicrous. Anybody who thinks about this for more than a few minutes would understand that,” Boeckenstedt told University World News.

Palumbo, who says that his polytechnical school is “data-driven”, told me that SAT’s pitch, that a prospective student’s score when combined with the Grade Point Average (GPA) is predictive of future achievement, is less than what meets the eye.

First, he said the College Board does not share its “proprietary data” on which this claim rests.

Second, “when we look at the validity study, the high school GPA, and test score when paired together, have a validity score of point .61 on a 1.0 scale, pretty strong correlation says they're helpful. However, the high school GPA accounts for .53 of that .61 correlation. The SATs account for .08 of the total correlation”.

Geiser’s chapter reports similar findings using UCS data. After controlling for various factors, he found that the SATs “account for about 3% of the variance of the student’s first year grades at UC”.

Rise in diversity

At UC, going test blind has led to an increase in applications of 11% and, the university reports, the admission of the most diverse freshman class in the school’s history. UCLA, for example, welcomed the largest proportion of black, Latinx, American Indian or Pacific Islanders in three decades, 34%. Black students made up 7% of the incoming students. At the University at Irvine, the number of black students doubled.

None of this surprises Boeckenstedt or Palumbo. The doing away with the standardised tests and, especially, a student’s score on it – which effectively becomes their place on a league table made up of the SAT or ACT scores that each school requires to get in – has resulted in students basing their decisions on their interests and school performance.

As Boeckenstedt put it: “I think it [abandoning SATs and ACTs] has given a lot of students who felt that standardised tests weren't the best indicator of their ability, the option of applying without that burden of a sort of scarlet letter attached to them, suggesting that maybe they weren't college ready or weren't as college ready as other candidates.”

What, then, do admissions officers at schools like OSU or WPI use to make their admissions decisions? For next year’s incoming class, which will be WPI’s first test-blind intake, after receiving a transcript, Palumbo told me, admissions officers look at the high school’s profile to determine the rigour of the courses the student took.

If, for example, the high school offers only a few Advanced Placement (AP) courses (as would be the case in a poor school servicing a disadvantaged population) and an applicant took two or three AP courses, she/he is adjudged as having taken a more rigorous programme than a student who went to a school that offered 25 AP courses and she/he took two.

Further, since WPI presently has 50 STEM projects running overseas, in which sophomores, juniors and seniors are working with governments, NGOs, private firms and local communities to solve real world problems, applicants are required to write a short essay explaining why they think they will fit into a school that builds a collaborative learning/working environment.

Additionally, after hearing from the low-income families that the application fee was a barrier that was difficult to overcome, WPI discontinued its application fee. Palumbo characterised the fee as, “Here’s some money, please judge me.”

Process the same for foreign students

While OSU has made the SATs and ACTs optional for foreign students, Boeckenstedt told me in an e-mail that in the main, the application process is the same as for students from the United States. “Like all students, the performance in secondary classes is the strongest predictor of a student’s ability to do college-level work.”

WPI, which has discontinued the use of SATs and ACTs for foreign students, takes a harder view. Since the tests are inequitable and offer little-to-no additive value to our application review, says Palumbo, “we will not consider test scores even if students want us to. To do so would reinforce the privilege and power that we are seeking to remove from the admissions process”.

Decisions to either make the SATs and ACTs optional or to discontinue their use entirely does not affect the TOEFL (Test Of English as a Foreign Language) or other language proficiency test for admissions. “Students who are not proficient in English won’t be able to get past the visa interview at the US embassy or consulate,” says Boeckenstedt.

He also pointed out a legal reason for requiring a language proficiency test. Were a university or college to admit a large number of foreign students who were not proficient in English, the school’s ability to issue I-20s (Certificate of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant Student Status) could be compromised.