PERSPECTIVE ON COLLEGE ADMISSIONS : Don’t Look for Merit in Test Scores : Standardized tests to determine admission of student athletes discriminate against the poor and minorities.

While many educators join the majority of Californians who believe that university admissions policies should be based primarily on merit rather than race or gender, we stand firmly opposed to colleges for which “merit” means a reliance on standardized test scores.

Often lost in the ongoing and acrimonious debate about admissions policies is the fact that standardized test scores have virtually nothing to do with academic merit. A preponderance of scientific research shows that using test scores as admissions criteria actually discriminates against many qualified students.

Concerns about race and gender justifiably enter the debate at this juncture because, as the research makes clear, a disproportionate majority of these qualified students who are impacted unfairly are minorities or females or from low-income families. A sizable number will be white students.

That’s why in the debate about admissions standards, we shouldn’t equate “educationally disadvantaged” or “marginally prepared” students with “academically unqualified” students. They are not the same.

This is not a matter of preferential treatment; it is fair treatment. At stake are fundamental issues of educational and ethical propriety, not affirmative action. The academic requirements of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., which is holding its annual convention next week in Dallas, provide a clear case in point. Since 1986, the NCAA has required all incoming Division I student athletes to meet both test score and high school GPA minimums.

According to the association’s research, its present test-score standard would have eliminated 45% of all black student athletes and 7% of all white student athletes who graduated from college the year before the rule went into effect. In other words, these stark percentages represent students who are verifiably qualified and who deserve to study and compete at NCAA institutions currently denying them that opportunity.

Additionally, in all of the relevant research there is a strong correlation between a student’s test score and his or her family’s income; poor students typically score lower. In other words, when the selection process involves test scores, money, not merit, becomes destiny.

The unfair exclusion of minority and low-income students was confirmed in a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics. It also found that female students are twice as likely as males to be disqualified by NCAA test-score requirements, even though females tend to get higher grades in high school and college.

One vote on the NCAA convention floor worth paying attention to involves a last-chance piece of legislation known as Proposition 17. This would reduce the discriminatory impact of current NCAA requirements by eliminating SAT and ACT mandates for student athletes with solid high school grades in core courses. With the association’s most stringent set of requirements slated to take effect in August, Proposition 17 is the last opportunity for the NCAA to make its eligibility rules fairer through its own internal mechanisms.

If Proposition 17 fails, the debate over test score standards will undoubtedly move into the courts. Given the rising anger over the unfair use of standardized test scores, lawsuits against the NCAA are virtually inevitable.

I predict the NCAA will eventually lose and lose big time.

Why? Because the general public and the judiciary are becoming more aware and disabusing themselves of the notion that merit-based standards must include test-score requirements. As a federal court concluded in a 1989 case, “SAT scores capture a student’s academic achievement no more than a student’s yearbook captures the full range of her experiences in high school.”