New Admissions Standards for the University of California
Charlie Nguyen - Flickr
On May 21, the Board of Regents for the University of California (UC) announced that the UC system will no longer accept the SATs for admission by Californian high school students.
President of the UC System, Janet Napolitano said that the reason for this decision was because of the “correlation of the SAT and the ACT to the socio-economic level of the student, and in some cases, the ethnicity of the student.”
The UC system had already removed standardized testing as a prerequisite for entry due to the difficulty of conducting the logistics of the exam due to the coronavirus. Napolitano proposed supra and the board had decided to support the proposal after six hours of debate unanimously. The tests will be optional until 2022 when they will be phased out completely.
John Perez, the chair of the regents, has stated that this decision was meant to align the admissions standards with the “broad-based values that the university has identified [with.]”
This has implications for the future of admissions standards of the American university. The UC system is one the largest and most highly ranked public university systems- so whatever decisions these officials make would likely impact the decisions of other American universities and university systems. Various pressure groups have already called for standardized testing to be phased out of the UC admissions system.
Groups such as Rise and Public Council have argued for the SAT and ACT to be spurred out in favor of a more fair system. Public Council has even sued in court arguing that the UC system’s use of the SAT and ACT is against California law. The organization cited bias towards candidates with higher socio-economic statuses to bolster their argument.
Other opponents of the tests have also argued that the exams do not accurately reflect the success of potential students. These opponents argue that the SATs may be able to predict the GPA of the first year, but it fails to do anything further.
Carol Christ, the chancellor of UC Berkeley has argued that the test does not fulfill the goal of predicting academic success. She also claimed that tests might be actually contributing to “systematic inequalities in the educational system.”
College Board, the not-for-profit organization that runs the SAT, has stated that they are dedicated to combating these inequalities.
The debate on whether or not to keep or get rid of the SATs and ACTs in the admissions process has been long-term. Napolitano has been pushing for the elimination of the SAT and ACT as far back as 2018.
Even as recent as February, the UC Board announced that they were going to keep the SATs and the ACTs because the exams may boost the enrollment of students from lower socioeconomic statuses.
The report commissioned found that test scores were weighted with the socioeconomic status of the applicant. It found that the tests allowed applicants of more disadvantaged backgrounds to have an easier time receiving enrollment offers than someone of a higher socioeconomic status with the same test score.
The report concluded that the standardized testing procedure neither worsens the existing disparities nor makes any substantive improvements to existing racial and class disparities. Latino, Black, and Native Americans make up 61% of Californian high schoolers, but only 31% of incoming freshmen to the UCs. This may be a woefully low percentage, but it is more than other universities and university systems. The report also states that the admissions process helps make up for the potential test score discrepancies between different socioeconomic classes.
In addition, the report stated that the admissions process relies more on high school grades than any other factor. It also found that there might be an underlying concern that if the UC system eliminated standardized testing, it would encourage grade inflation, which is already a concern amongst more affluent schools. This decision will now be altered due to the more recent decision by the UC Board of Regents.
The decision to phase out testing has also come with the controversial decision to support the return of affirmative action to the UC system. Currently, Proposition 209 outlaws affirmative action, but many have pushed for its repeal. Supporters of abrogation have argued that the law, which had taken effect in 1996, helped cause the decline of racial and socioeconomic diversity amongst the UC student body. While California voted for this law through a state-wide referendum in 1996, the UC Board of Regents voted for it independently in 1995. This time the board unanimously voted in support of ending the law since it cannot legally reverse it on its own accord.
The decision has received criticism from some groups, including multiple Asian American ones. These groups worry about the possibility of it being a de facto racial quota system. However, polls show that the majority of Asian Americans support a form of affirmative action and both Asian American members of the UC Board of Regents voted in favor of adopting affirmative action. The board has stated that while Caucasian and Asian students increased their share of the university’s student body, other minority groups decreased their share.
