Testing the Foundation of Berkeley Admissions

They stood before reporters and television cameras, flanked by the phalanx of civil rights lawyers who have made them Exhibit A in this latest round of the emotional battle over whose college system is this, anyway.

The ditch-digger’s son who worked in the fields after high school each day, and still graduated with a 4.0 GPA. The aspiring teacher whose pedigree includes the National Honor Society and the Academic Decathlon team. The math whiz who excels in biochemistry, tutors kids at her church and works as a store clerk to supplement her family’s income.

Latino, black, Filipino . . . working-class kids from overburdened public schools and uneducated families, now suing for admission to the state’s most prestigious public university.

They had applied last spring--with high hopes and strong credentials--to UC Berkeley, the flagship of California’s state university chain. They wound up, instead, at UC Irvine, Davis, San Diego . . . consolation prizes in their quest for the best education California has to offer.

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The lawsuit was filed last week by civil rights groups on behalf of eight minority students denied admission to Berkeley last fall. It asserts that the university has replaced affirmative action with an admissions process that is tilted to keep out qualified blacks, Latinos and Filipinos.

“UC Berkeley’s admissions process . . . violates federal civil rights laws,” said Kimberly West-Faulcon of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The university “needs to go back to the drawing board to develop a fair and nondiscriminatory process.”

But wasn’t that what ending affirmative action was supposed to do: foster fairness and eliminate discrimination, restore balance to a process that critics said had shifted to give ethnicity and race the edge over ability and merit?

Turns out that it’s a complicated and troublesome process, this discerning of merit among Californians with backgrounds so different that they might as well have come from different parts of the world, rather than from across the state.

How to gauge the measure of a student whose parents speak no English, whose school has few computers or textbooks, who had to take the bus to the library from his after-school job each night to get in what little studying he could manage. And still graduated with honors.

How to compare his potential to that of children of privilege, whose private school education, tutors and enrichment classes gave them the means to make the most of their talents, whereas all the poor child could rely on was his drive to excel?

In post-affirmative action California, civil rights groups say merit has come down to a numbers game . . . that acceptance by UC Berkeley--the state’s most competitive school--now relies so much on SAT scores and grades in high school honors classes that it confers built-in advantages on students from white, middle-class schools.

“What about the kids in overcrowded schools, where they don’t offer the [advanced placement] classes that give them the extra points or the SAT prep courses that can raise test scores?” asks Julie A. Su of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, one of the groups pressing the suit.

“How do you judge qualities like character and motivation, talent and leadership on a pencil-and-paper test like the SAT?” she adds.

University officials deny that their procedures are unfair to minorities.

“There’s a perception that places like Berkeley do it by the numbers, and that’s just not true,” admissions director Bob Laird says. “We don’t just reward the students with the highest numbers.”

But Laird and other UC admissions directors concede they see a growing--and unhealthy--preoccupation these days with test scores, as students strive to gain an edge in college admissions. And they see this trend accelerating as the applicant pool grows and the best public schools become even more selective.

“Over all, society’s focused on the tests and the numbers,” Laird says. “We’ve become obsessed with the SAT, as if it defines a whole individual.”

In fact, research has shown that SAT scores bear very little relationship to success in college--or in life. Typically, the higher the family income and the more education a child’s parents have, the higher the SAT score.

“These are also the parents most likely to push their kids, to sign up for the tutors, the prep courses, to raise their scores even more,” says one college counselor at a private high school. “They’re convinced that a couple of points will make the difference between their kid going to Berkeley or [UC] Riverside.”

And it’s not just UC Berkeley. From grade school to law school, we look at test scores to divine the truth . . . to tell us how good our schools are, how smart our children are, how ready they are to go off to med school or on to the sixth grade.

But they are only numbers. And in the end, relying on them to shape our future will simply replace one form of inequality with another.

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.