David Trend
In recent weeks, more than 1400 University of California faculty signed a petition to reinstate the ACT and SAT, starting with a math exam for STEM applicants. Humanities faculty soon followed and the system’s Academic Senate began a review. The commotion started with a UC San Diego report showing entering students had been testing at a middle school level since 2020. The numbers are genuine and the worry is sincere. But the conclusion is where the trouble begins. A faculty panic over a three hour exam is being framed as a return to rigor, and it plays well in the press as a cultural symbol to reassure nervous professors and administrators that student difficulties can be remedied by resurrecting an old barrier.
The promise of relief rests upon an illusion. The SAT has never been merely a measure of academic ability. Rather it was a tool used to categorize the varying experiences of children throughout their lives into one numerical value that represented “merit.” Removing this one factor allowed for more diverse forms of measuring achievement, such as course work completed by each student, all four years of grades, the students’ environment or community context, and examples of how much the student learned through time. The plan to reinstate the test would be detrimental to this progress and would obscure an expansive demographic disaster as a simplistic morality tale with a single factor. Like most single-issue panics concerning education do, this story is clean and well defined but misleading. It confuses the obstacle for the structure behind it.
What do all of these tests really measure? SAT scores are essentially a reflection of how U.S. schools are structured, geographically located, funded, and how unequal students’ access is to higher-level courses. While the SAT does not produce racial inequity, it does launder racial inequity. It takes the existing social structure and creates an arbitrary numerical measurement that can be interpreted as if there were some objective basis for those numbers. A student’s household income affects their ability to perform on the SAT at virtually every point along the way. Wealthy families can afford to purchase private tutors, prep courses, study guides, professional guidance services and most importantly time; something working class families cannot afford. Data from Brookings Institute reveal that the black/white score differential has remained relatively consistent for nearly two decades, with the exception of a slight decline (from .91 SD to .79 SD). In reality, the apparent proof of individual merit that exists in many people’s minds demonstrates little more than an intergenerational transfer of advantage. However, the one thing that the test clearly demonstrates is the infrastructure surrounding a child since he/she entered kindergarten.
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