Critics, UC Are at Odds Over SAT II

It’s the “other SAT,” a college admissions test less known and less controversial than its high-profile counterpart.

Until now.

The SAT II, a series of achievement tests taken annually by fewer than a fifth of the high school students who take the SAT, is suddenly in the spotlight. And it’s the focus of an intensifying debate of its own.

Proponents, backed by new studies from the University of California, contend that the subject-based tests are fairer to many students than the SAT, and better predictors of how they are likely to do in college.

With UC President Richard C. Atkinson’s recent proposal to scrap the SAT as an admissions requirement, the achievement tests have become a logical alternative, they say.

But critics say the SAT II tests, one-hour exams on a variety of subjects, present many of the same problems as those long known about the SAT, including persistent score gaps among ethnic groups.

Other criticisms concern certain SAT II exams, ranging from foreign languages to biology, and the weight they carry in UC admissions. Some argue that native speakers of Spanish, for example, have an unfair advantage on the test of proficiency in that language.

Overall, the tests “have all the flaws of the SAT--and then some,” said Robert Schaeffer of Fair Test, a nonprofit testing watchdog group based in Cambridge, Mass.

“There’s been remarkably little independent research done on the SAT II,” Schaeffer said, “and what there is raises real concerns.”

The College Board, which owns both the SAT and the SAT II, contends that both tests are fair and provide important information in college admissions. In response to criticism, however, it is exploring changes in each test.

Debate Comes at a Crucial Juncture

The growing debate over the SAT II, with UC officials on one side and a variety of education and testing experts on the other, is part of a superheated national discussion about the role of standardized tests in college admissions.

It comes at a crucial juncture, as California’s top public university system tries to broaden access to its campuses through sweeping changes in admissions standards.

The outcome could affect the criteria used to judge college applicants in California and elsewhere for years to come.

“Everyone who’s in testing or higher education in the country is watching what the UC does on these issues,” said Jay Rosner, who heads the Princeton Review Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the test preparation company. “It’s just critically important.”

Atkinson, who has emerged in recent months as the nation’s leading critic of the SAT, has asked his faculty to explore using the SAT II as an alternative, at least for now.

“We think it’s a better test,” Atkinson said in a recent interview. He cited UC studies suggesting that the SAT II has better predictive powers than the SAT, and is less apt to reflect socioeconomic disparities.

Nonetheless, Atkinson said, he views the SAT II exam as an interim solution for the university, pending the development of a test more closely linked to California’s high school curriculum.

Relatively Few Schools Require SAT II Tests

The SAT II tests have always been dwarfed in volume--and attention--by the SAT, which tests students on general verbal and math knowledge and reasoning abilities.

The achievement tests are required by a relatively small number of American universities, including the UC and elite private schools, mainly as an adjunct to the better-known SAT.

But in recent years, a growing number of schools, mainly small liberal arts colleges, have decided to make the SAT optional. Many have expressed concerns about the test’s validity, particularly the yawning ethnic gaps that show up in its scores. The average scores of black and Latino students tend to lag behind those of whites and Asians.

In February, Atkinson fueled the debate by recommending that the UC drop the exam. A respected cognitive psychologist and testing expert in his own right, the UC president said the SAT is unfair to many students and fails to measure how much they learn in high school.

Since then, as the faculty committee that sets the university’s admissions standards has begun to explore the issue, Atkinson has sharpened his rhetoric. The SAT has become a “destructive national obsession,” he declared in a recent speech.

But even before that, UC had moved to diminish its reliance on the test.

Last year, the university reworked its eligibility index--used to determine basic eligibility systemwide--to give the SAT II tests twice as much weight as that given to the SAT.

All applicants to the UC must take the SAT verbal and math tests, along with SAT II writing and math subject exams, and select a third achievement test from 18 other subjects, including languages. The three SAT II exams are counted equally.

Now, UC officials say, a faculty admissions committee is considering further changes to the index, including whether to increase the number of achievement tests from three to five if the SAT is eliminated.

But UC’s growing reliance on the subject-based tests worries a variety of educators and testing experts.

Some critics, mainly in the test preparation industry, object to the weight given SAT II language tests. They say native speakers of some foreign languages, including Spanish, Korean and Chinese, appear to enjoy a significant advantage on the optional language tests--and, they suspect, in UC admissions.

Several, like David Benjamin, the owner of a private test preparation company in Irvine, and executives with Kaplan Inc., a major company, said they believe the language advantage may account, at least in part, for this year’s 13% jump in Latino admissions to the UC.

But UC officials said other factors, including new outreach efforts, admissions changes and California’s rapidly growing Latino population, were probably more significant in the enrollment shift.

Atkinson said the university did not intend the language tests as a form of backdoor affirmative action, which voters banned statewide in 1996, but he does not consider the advantage conveyed to native speakers unfair.

“We’ve always had the view that we want to reward kids with a second language,” he said. “For us now to say that we’re somehow worried about it, that doesn’t make any sense. . . . You might ask if it’s unfair to be testing [these students] in English if that isn’t their first language.”

Data from the College Board show that Latino and Asian students in California and nationwide tend to score much higher, on average, on the SAT II language exams than white or African American students on the same tests--or on any of the third-choice alternatives.

Native Speakers Do Well on Spanish Test

The advantage conveyed by the second-language tests are well known to many high school guidance counselors and students.

“Our students who are native Spanish speakers have done wonderfully on the Spanish language SAT II test,” said Susan Bonoff, a college counselor at North Hollywood High School. “It’s a good way for them to bolster their scores.”

But UC Regent Ward Connerly said he is troubled by what appears to be an especially harsh impact on African Americans. Those students, he said, have no second-language benefit and, more often than their white peers, attend poor schools that fail to prepare them adequately in many subjects.

“We need to ask who benefits from the double-weighting of these language tests,” said Connerly, a leader in the 1996 statewide movement to ban affirmative action. “Black kids certainly don’t. . . . In fact, they’re being disadvantaged.”

Criticism of the SAT II extends beyond the language exams. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, now on leave from his position as a professor of biology and biochemistry at UC San Francisco, is a longtime critic of the SAT II biology test.

“It’s too broad and too shallow to test anything meaningful,” Alberts said. “We need to get rid of the trivial factual recall and make sure kids really understand science.”

Some other experts, including Fair Test’s Schaeffer, worry more generally that the SAT II has not been sufficiently studied.

“Our perspective is that tests ought to be treated like pharmaceutical drugs; they’re not necessarily bad, but they need to be demonstrated safe and effective before they’re imposed on the general population,” Schaeffer said. “That hasn’t been demonstrated with the SAT II.”

College Board officials say each test has distinct advantages for colleges and students.

“The institution has to decide, but the best thing may be for colleges to give students as many options as possible, so they can get as much information as possible,” said Gretchen Rogol, a board vice president.

Still, College Board officials said they are examining possible changes in each of the tests.

For the SAT, researchers are exploring the idea of dropping the verbal analogies section--a pet peeve of Atkinson’s--and giving students more time to complete certain sections, said Wayne Camara, the board’s vice president of research and development.

On the SAT II, Camara said, researchers are looking into tailoring the test to fit California’s curriculum, perhaps by adding a section on the state’s history.

“We’re very happy to work with Dr. Atkinson and the UC,” Camara said. “And if they want to pick an achievement battery of tests for the university system, there’s no doubt in my mind that the SAT II is the best.”