UC Urged to Drop SATs as Admission Criteria

SAN FRANCISCO —  A University of California task force Thursday called on the Board of Regents to eliminate the use of SAT scores in admissions decisions so as to boost the number of Latinos eligible for the state’s elite college system.

The Latino Eligibility Task Force, composed of faculty members and administrators from nine campuses, warned that continued use of the standardized Scholastic Assessment Tests could mean a drop of up to 70% in the number of Latino students at the system’s most selective campuses, UCLA and UC Berkeley, as affirmative action comes to an end in undergraduate admissions. That plunge would come as the number of Latinos in kindergarten through grade 12 in California’s classrooms is rising dramatically, and may reach 50% of total enrollment within a decade.

“Any way you look at it, it is not a healthy dynamic for Latinos, it is not a healthy dynamic for the state,” said Eugene Garcia, the dean of Berkeley’s school of education, who chaired the task force.

The panel said that eliminating the SAT as a requirement would more than double the number of Latinos eligible for admission to the UC system.

The proposal to make the tests optional received a remarkably warm reception from the regents, even Ward Connerly, who led the statewide campaign to abolish affirmative action.

Connerly did suggest, though, that the goal should be to help all poor students--who tend to score lower on the tests--regardless of their race or ethnicity. “The things you are saying are not unique to Latinos,” he said. “They apply across the board to Asians, whites, blacks . . . to a lot of students who are disadvantaged.”

Some critics will no doubt see the recommendation as a way to make an end run around the regents’ decision to end affirmative action, in order to again give preferences to minorities.

But university President Richard Atkinson welcomed the proposals, though he stopped short of endorsing them. “This is something we should move on,” he said. “I find this recommendation a very interesting one.”

The Board of Regents, which requested the study, could vote on the proposals as early as next March, after they go through a series of committees. If approved, they could be implemented with the freshman class entering UC schools in the fall of 1999.

The task force recommendation is the latest of a series to take a fresh look at admissions criteria with the end of affirmative action, which already has resulted in drastic reductions in the number of blacks and Latinos entering some UC medical, law and business graduate schools. With the ban on affirmative action being extended to undergraduates this academic year, admissions decisions will be based almost exclusively on students’ high school grades and scores on the verbal and math SATs.

Some of the ideas floated have included automatically admitting--regardless of their SAT scores--the valedictorian from each California high school, the top 6% or even the top 12.5% of each school’s graduating class.

Faced with a similar situation after an anti-affirmative action court decision, Texas this year passed a law granting the top 10% of the students at each high school admission to public colleges beginning next fall. Students meeting that standard do not have to submit standardized test scores.

If the UC system were to stop requiring applicants to take the SATs, it would join about 285 four-year colleges nationwide that have done so. Applicants to the California State University system with a B average or better in high school already do not have to submit standardized test scores, although most do.

The task force recommendations were applauded by FairTest, a Boston-based organization that advocates optional use of the SATs, contending that the tests do not accurately predict how well high school students will perform when they get to college.

Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for the group, said it is better to make admissions decisions based largely on high school grades, because that enables “kids who have performed well in the classroom over time to be rewarded for it to get a chance at the next level.”

But Fred Moreno, a spokesman for the College Board, which oversees the SATs, defended the tests as objective measures that enable universities to compare applicants from different schools or states--especially in an age of grade inflation, when legions of students graduate from high school with A averages.

The lower scores for some minority groups do not mean the tests are biased, he said, but sometimes reflect the poorer schools they attend. Mexican American students, in particular, take far fewer academic courses than those from other groups, he said.

“We do know there is a relationship . . . between the amount of academics in high schools and tests such as the SAT,” he said.

So, he said, “The thing to do would be to try to improve the academic preparation of those kids, so they can do better.”

Currently, the UC system evaluates applicants based on a formula that weighs their grades and scores on the well-known SAT math and verbal exams, along with their scores on other SAT tests in subjects such as physics and history. At Berkeley, that formula alone determines about 50% of the admissions decisions.

The UC task force recommended that in place of the SATs, admissions officers use alternative tests, such as the end-of-course Golden State exams, which many students now take to achieve academic honors. Those are not general aptitude tests, but are based on schools’ curriculums.

Some campus chancellors urged caution in making a major change in the admissions process.

UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale said he would need to study the issue. He said that “the best predictor of how well a student will do in courses is how well they did [in high school],” but that universities also need other measures, such as the SATs.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl similarly said that the proposal is worth studying but that he is concerned about its impact.

The report cast a stark light on Latino access to the UC system, in which just 4% of the 155,000 students enrolled last year were of that ethnicity.

Latino families want the best higher education for their children, but those “aspirations have been washed away by the cold-water reality of bad schools, cultural and social discrimination, and a great, but unwelcoming university,” the report said.

“Things cannot remain the way they are. Ya basta!!!!,” meaning enough is enough.

According to the report, dropping the SATs would raise the eligibility among Latino high school students from 3.9% to 6.2%--a 59% rise. Eliminating the tests also would make 16.9% of all students “UC eligible”--above the Master Plan for Higher Education’s limit of 12.5%--meaning that not all eligible students would find a seat.

Aside from dropping the mandatory SATs, the report recommends expanding “outreach” by UC campuses to help improve schools.

The report also suggests a multimedia campaign in Spanish and English to educate Latino students and their parents about the UC system and what is necessary to attend.

The task force advocated going ahead with building the new UC campus proposed for Merced, saying it would help serve the rising Latino population in the Central Valley. Regents today are expected to formally authorize planning such a campus, although there are no funds to build it.

The report came on a day when the Rev. Jesse Jackson appeared at the regents’ meeting to scold the board for its own 1995 resolution eliminating affirmative action, a move that then gained statewide support with last November’s passage of Proposition 209.

“You are locking our youth out to lock them up in jail,” Jackson said. “We are building first-class jails and second-class schools--a moral disgrace.”

Last fall, Latinos made up about 18% of the students at UCLA, while 40% were Asians, 35% white and 6.3% African Americans.

For this fall’s incoming class, 1,521 Latinos were accepted out of 3,727 applicants. The Latino students as a group had a grade-point average of 3.9 and a combined verbal and math SAT score of 1126.

By comparison, Asian American freshman at UCLA had a grade-point average of 4.13 and a combined SAT of 1282, and whites had a grade-point average of 4.06 and a combined SAT of 1280.

African Americans’ grade-point average was 3.78 with a combined SAT of 1108.

BACKGROUND

The discussion over the use of SAT tests in undergraduate admissions comes as the University of California grapples with a 1996 regents decision to end affirmative action. The number of minority students admitted to some medical, law and business schools already has declined. Groups such as FairTest, which tracks the use of standardized exams like the SATs, contend that they are not good predictors of who will do well in college and that they favor students who can afford expensive coaching courses. They also point to research showing that students whose first language is not English have greater difficulty with such tests because they are slowed down by the process of translating the questions.