The change is expected to accelerate the momentum of American colleges away from the tests, amid concern that they are unfair to poor, black and Hispanic students.
Terrible
In California, the board acted Thursday on a proposal from the university system’s president, Janet Napolitano, which came after several years of pressure. A lawsuit filed last year by a largely black school district in Compton, Calif., and a coalition of students and advocacy groups argues that the time-honored tests discriminate based on race and income.
The decision, however, ran counter to a recommendation from the system’s faculty senate, which voted in April to keep the SAT and ACT. A faculty task force commissioned to study the impact of standardized tests found that they predict college success within the University of California system more effectively than high school grades or other measures.
In fact, the task force found that in many cases the tests gave a leg up to black, Latino and low-income students by offering an additional metric for admissions officers who might have rejected them because their grades did not meet the university’s threshold.
Robert May, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Davis, who appointed the faculty panel, said the regents’ decision would add confusion and significant costs to the admissions process at the mammoth system, and make admissions determinations even more subjective in the short-term. […]
But as California has struggled to maintain campus diversity since voters passed a 1996 ban on affirmative action, pressure has grown for the school system to take action. Its top campuses have become almost as difficult to get into as some Ivy League schools and are demographically dominated by white and Asian students.
For the last 20 years, black enrollment at University of California schools has scarcely broken 4 percent, though African-Americans represent 6.5 percent of the state’s population. Nearly 40 percent of the state is Hispanic, California’s largest ethnic group, but only 22 percent of students in the school system are.
Carol Christ, now the Berkeley chancellor, was one of the first university administrators to eliminate the SAT requirement nearly two decades ago when she became president of Smith College. On Thursday, she told the regents that she viewed standardized testing as “a biased instrument” that would only become more skewed in the wake of the pandemic.
So what exactly are they going to use that ISN'T biased? (Someone please tell me the answer isn't "school grades, recommendations, essays and interviews" or I'm going to cry)
