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.
The biggest advantage is the most difficult to see. Students from households with college degree holders have a map of the admissions process. They know when to start applying, what courses to showcase, how to craft a statement, and the best strategy for financial aid. First-Gen may have just as much talent but not this final information. Standardized exams make matters worse, recognizing test taking skills along with proximity to those who have gained admission before. The movement to restore the SAT claims to defend standards, but in reality restores advantage to families already winning.
There is no denying that grades are imperfect. Inflation is real and standards vary from school to school. Nevertheless, a four year transcript says much more than what a single Saturday can tell about commitment over time, study habits, and persistence in the face of difficulty. Ironically in the context of the current debate, the UC system has massive data supporting this premise. After going test free, underrepresented students rose to 45% of those admitted, low income students 41%, and Latino students 39%. Admissions maintain their level of selectivity despite the change, as the new process told students that four years of work outweighed a single morning.
To be fair, test defenders are correct about a couple things. Research conducted by UC itself shows that adding a test to high school GPA brings some predictive value to first year grades as compared to using high school GPA alone. In fact when Dartmouth reinstated its testing policy (for non-resident freshmen), it claimed that there were good students coming out of poorly performing high schools who needed to be protected. And faculty alarmism is real. California is seeing documented gaps in math and reading across the state, and it makes sense to look closely at the San Diego numbers. But the reply is both narrow and mean. While predictability may indicate some degree of fairness, completeness, or correction, no predictive test can foretell first year success. But exams do sustain the very same inequalities that they measure.
It’s here that the moral panic truly fails. It confuses an acute institutional dilemma with a superficial technical problem. Students experience academic difficulties in college for many reasons unrelated to their SAT scores, including but limited to underfunded public schools, family poverty, the COVID-19 pandemic, crowded classrooms, inadequate advising, having to work full-time and take courses simultaneously, and of course, lingering bias and discrimination at every layer of education. Reintroducing the SAT addresses none of these. It can’t provide instruction in algebra. It cannot recruit additional advisors, create gifted programs, reduce class sizes, or restore lost study time to a student who works twenty hours per week. What the SAT can do is deflect blame. This is what makes the project appealing to those involved. Testing provides a solution that is swift and morally justifiable while reducing accountability for educating the students selected. A university obscuring systemic inequities in preparation with an additional obstacle merely directs the issue back to K-12 schools while proclaiming “standards” and “rigor.”
If higher education was willing to spend funds addressing these types of problems rather than merely complaining about them, then math and reading deficits could be addressed post-admission via first year courses, transition/bridge programs, self-invented tutoring, or data-driven support initiatives. Admissions should be focused on identifying students’ potential for colleges/universities to nurture and develop. The UCSD report aptly illustrates well-qualified students requiring slightly more pedagogical attention. The faculty reaction states that they should not have been admitted. Testing will not resolve this matter. The crisis was never based on incorrect perceptions of quality. The root crisis stems from the vastly disparate childhood experiences children have had since birth, the drastically different educational environments children grow up in, and the vast disparities in the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. The use of testing will result in a more select process for admissions. However, it will not create a better system nor make one child more prepared.