Working to Compete

These kids don’t want an easy way out.

They’ve been breaking their brains over SAT prep books for weeks. Now along comes a proposal to drop the dreaded test from University of California admissions decisions. That’s supposed to help more Latino students--more students like them--get into the state’s elite colleges.

And what do these kids say?

No thanks.

They’d rather puzzle out vocabulary words such as “conundrum” and “eccentric.” They’d rather sweat through “talon is to hawk” analogies. They’d even rather bumble through algebraic equations spiked with Xs and Ys.

Let high school junior Marina Maldonado explain: “Most people think that we, the Latinos, can’t do well on the SAT. We want to show them we can.”

In fact, Latinos as a group do not do well on the Scholastic Assessment Test. This year in California, for example, the mean score on the combined math and verbal portions of the exam was 888 for test-takers of Mexican descent (out of a possible 1600), contrasted with 1069 for white students and 1036 for those of Asian heritage. Those are the kinds of numbers that prompted the Latino Eligibility Task Force--composed of UC faculty members and administrators--to warn last month that continued use of the SAT would send Latino enrollment plunging with the end of affirmative action.

These students beg to differ.

A dozen or so have gathered in a stuffy Pico-Union church-turned-community center on a Tuesday night, determined to master the SAT.

Their buddies are upstairs having fun, banging jump shots in a sweat-spattered basketball game or pumping barbells to the dance beat blaring away in the weight room. But these students spend the night around two rectangular tables in a room adorned with a banner declaring: “You never know what you can do until you try.”

Whispering in Spanish, they open their books and pull out their calculators as their teacher, Emily Williams, directs them to a computation section of the SAT. At first, when she told them UC might abolish the test, the teens all cheered loudly. But then they thought about it some more.

“It kind of makes me mad,” said senior Ivonne Torres, still dressed in her basketball clothes. “If they give us a chance, if they put us in a Beverly Hills high school, we can do as well as anyone else.”

Sponsored by the private test-prep firm Princeton Review, this class, which meets for six hours a week, is one of many efforts underway to give poor kids the sort of extra help that rich kids have long been able to pay for. A group of USC law students also has begun sponsoring free prep classes at high schools around the county, calling their effort Project Pears.

Without these opportunities, Torres and her fellow students worry that they wouldn’t get the same level of SAT preparation--such as tips on how to approach standardized tests--as the suburban white students who consistently outscore them.

“You don’t have to cancel the SAT,” said Claudia Leiba, a junior at El Camino High. “But schools should prepare us more.”

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To be sure, Williams, a UCLA graduate student and veteran Princeton Review instructor, goes over basic facts--the stuff that may come up on the tests. Scrawling on an erasable board with fading red pen, she explained the other night why .37 is bigger than .307 and why a negative number squared comes out positive. She then set her students to figuring the original price of a dress marked down 20% to $88.

But Williams also teaches strategies for conquering the SATs.

She’s forever reminding her students, for example, to focus on the first questions in every section because they’re the easiest. Better to get them all right, she says, than to make mistakes in a rush to complete the section.

She reminds them, too, to watch for traps. Though it’s well and good to realize that X=25, she said, the point of the SAT is not to solve the equation, but to answer the question--which may well ask for the square root of X. Her students often do the math correctly, but fail to consider the nub of the question.

“They trust the test writers too much,” she said.

Though she makes her living off the SATs, Williams favors dropping them as a requirement. She’s among the critics who complain that they are culturally biased--not only against poor kids, but rural kids--and that they measure test-taking skills more than knowledge. And she says they make students, especially minorities, unjustly doubt their aptitude.

“They worry, ‘Is this how it’s going to be in college, too? Am I constantly going to feel like I’m 10 paces behind?’ ”

The students in Williams’ class are averaging about 900 on practice SAT tests. That’s good enough to get into college--even if it’s not Harvard or Stanford.

Torres is counting on the prep class to improve her score to at least 820--the magic number, she said, for her to get a basketball scholarship to Fresno State.

Several others want to attend UCLA. Janice Burns, a magnet-school student, hopes to study marketing at Boston University. Michael Obeng, whose parents emigrated from Ghana, has his heart set on Oral Roberts University. And earnest-looking Albino Perez is hoping to stretch his math skills at USC.

The way Perez figures it, the SAT is important because his score will indicate whether he can handle the work at a school like that. If the SAT were dropped, he said, he would worry that an admissions director might let him into a school that would prove too tough. With the test scores, “they know exactly where to place you,” he said.

As Perez whizzed through practice math problems, Karen Garcia, in her Mickey Mouse headband, flipped through a fat stack of flashcards. She had spent three hours the other night looking up 104 vocabulary words that had stumped her.

Mower. Constrain. Intransigence. Skepticism. She was determined to learn them all.

Garcia, who immigrated from El Salvador five years ago, thinks the SAT is too expensive for poor students. But she, like the others, is insulted by the notion that the tests should be canned because Latinos cannot do well on them.

“That’s discrimination,” she said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Putting SATs to the Test

The Scholastic Assessment Test is supposed to predict how qualified--and prepared--students are for college work. But critics say the SAT measures something else: the impact of the cultural and educational opportunities afforded by affluence. Though there is a strong correlation between high test scores and income and parents’ education level, students who take more advanced courses also score higher. The question? Does the coursework make the difference, or do smarter students gravitate toward tougher courses?

The Wealthier the Household . . .

SAT tests taken in California show that scores rise with the income of the students’ families. Two-thirds of Mexican-American high school graduates come from families with incomes of less than $25,000 annually.

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FAMILY INCOME Verbal Math Less Than $10,000 409 450 $10,000-$20,000 437 469 $20,000-$30,000 468 487 $30,000-$40,000 490 507 $40,000-$50,000 503 516 $50,000-$60,000 513 528 $60,000-$70,000 516 530 $70,000-$80,000 524 537 $80,000-$100,000 535 547 More than $100,000 556 575

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Source: The College Board, 1997

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. . . the More Educated the Parents

California Sat scores show that the highest scores are recorded by students whose parents have the most education.

Highest Level of Parental

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Education Verbal Math No High School Diploma 402 441 High School Diploma 468 485 Associate’s Degree 483 494 Bachelor’s Degree 518 538 Graduate Degree 551 566

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Source: The College Board, 1997

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It Helps to Take Physics and Calculus . . .

Students who score higher nationally on the math exam are more likely to have taken calculus and physics, and Asian-American males score highest on both measures. In general, the more academic courses students take, the better they do.

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Ethnic Group Avg SAT Math Percent taking Score Calculus Physics Asian American males 578 44 70 White males 545 26 54 Asian American females 543 39 63 Averages for all males 530 26 53 White females 510 22 44 Averages for all females 494 22 44 Latino males 492 21 52 American Indian males 492 15 41 Mexican-American males 478 19 43 Puerto Rican males 469 14 47 American Indian females 460 13 33 Latino females 449 16 42 Mexican American females 444 15 35 Black males 433 12 39 Puerto Rican females 431 11 37 Black females 416 13 38

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Source: College Board, 1997