Dump SAT Test to Lower the Bar of Exclusion

I went to UC Irvine last week looking for a certain class of underachiever: the kind who made it to college despite low SAT scores.

They’re a dying breed, these walking anomalies who undermine the validity of the college entrance exam. Since the repeal of affirmative action, nobody supposedly gets admitted to California’s elite public university without meeting strict standards.

Nowadays, the admissions cutoff has calcified into a formula for eligibility: Grades plus scores equal opportunity. Under the old rules, some students who didn’t quite make the cut also were given a chance. They were often Latinos and African Americans, who historically score lower on standardized tests than their white or Asian counterparts. If they showed potential, they could get a break.

We don’t like to give people breaks anymore. We say it’s insulting to minorities to assume they can’t cut it like everybody else. So we rely heavily on those SAT scores to tell us who gets in and who stays out.

Too heavily, says University of California President Richard C. Atkinson. In a speech that shook academia last week, he called for dropping the SAT as a requirement for college admission.

Atkinson, a cognitive psychologist and testing expert, said the test isn’t fair because it doesn’t measure what students learn in school. What it does measure is such a mystery, he said, that even the test’s developers don’t know what to call it anymore. In the past decade, he noted, the name has changed from Scholastic Aptitude Test to Scholastic Achievement Test to just plain SAT, which now stands for nothing.

For years, critics have argued that the SAT is not the best predictor of academic success. Students who score low can thrive on campus and later in life.

So where are they, these successful exceptions?

In his office at UC Irvine, Vice Chancellor Manuel Gomez handed me a book titled “The Elusive Quest for Equality: 150 Years of Chicano/Chicana Education.” He pointed to the editor’s name on the cover: a UC Irvine grad named Jose F. Moreno.

Born in Sinaloa and raised in Oxnard, Moreno earned his bachelor’s in social ecology at UC Irvine and went on to earn his doctorate in education from Harvard, specializing in the educational value of diversity. He’s 31 and teaching at USC.

Moreno’s SAT score: A mediocre 1,020 out of a perfect 1,600.

Combined with a straight B average at Hueneme High School, Class of ‘87, Moreno didn’t look like Ivy League material at first glance. The son of a seamstress and a factory mechanic, he made it to UC as a “special action admit,” not strictly eligible but promising.

Moreno was tempted to give up college because of finances. But he stayed the course because he didn’t want to be “one more Chicano that doesn’t make it, one more casualty.”

In the volume of essays he edited, he notes a troubling table of SAT data that tracks scores by students’ family income. The chart shows that the disparity in performance among racial groups persists even for the middle class. Yes, blacks and Latinos score much higher on average as income increases. But as a group, even middle-class minorities lag behind their white and Asian counterparts.

That’s perplexing, says Moreno. Shouldn’t test scores even out as economic disadvantages disappear? Since they don’t, who’s to blame? The test takers or the test?

One researcher, Stanford University’s Claude Steele, has found that test-taking stress works insidiously against the most motivated minority students, those middle-class achievers who care deeply about doing well. The fear of failing takes a toll on good students working under the onus of negative stereotypes, including white males compared to Asians. Steele calls it “stereotype threat,” a distracting anxiety that is proven to lower performance.

Still, it’s hard to let go of these testing tools that fool us into thinking we can sort society by the numbers. It’s one of the great American myths to think success is truly based on merit. In real life, rewards for performance are often determined by what the market does, what ratings say, what new management wants.

(Any doubts? Check out Parade magazine’s list of how much Americans earn annually, published Sunday. Britney Spears, 18, singer: $15 million. Jacqueline Flowers, 43, registered nurse: $23,700.)

Still, there are those who fear that dumping the SAT means degrading our standards.

“I would agree with them that it lowers the bar,” said Moreno as his baby girl, Karina, cried in the background. “The bar of exclusion.”

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com