Even the LA Times Editorial Board thinks that the UC system's dropping admissions tests was a bad idea:
The SAT and ACT college admission exams are riddled with problems in their current form. Though they can be helpful predictors of whether students will succeed in college, they shut out too many bright and otherwise qualified candidates because those who can spend the money for private tutoring will almost always have the edge in getting higher scores. More affluent students also can pay to take the tests over and over to get their best possible scores.
So, it’s understandable, if not ideal, that the University of California dropped them for acceptance decisions.
But now UC has decided it will not use any entrance exam. Not the state’s standardized test for 11th graders. Not an exam that UC designs itself. University officials concluded any test would be prone to bias and the state’s Smarter Balanced exam would provide only modest additional useful information.
This nonetheless is a problematic decision, especially after a committee of faculty leaders concluded in 2020, after expansive study, that the SAT and ACT were worth keeping and could help diversify the student population. UC should reconsider this policy and use at least one test as part of its admission process, though it should be free to students with a few no-cost retries.
Grade inflation is widespread at affluent high schools, creating an inequitable situation. The holistic review UC uses for admission that can count any number of factors that the admissions officers happen to find appealing is even more subjective than course grades.
A test score can be an important check against straight-A report cards or a more lackluster transcript — which is what the faculty committee concluded three years ago. If a student has glowing grades but flubs a test badly time after time, that raises legitimate questions about how earned those grades were. And a student who performs well on the test but has weak grades might have had teachers who were tougher graders. Likewise, the student might be the sort of independent soul who would make a brilliant university student but doesn’t do well with the regimented rules and limited course offerings of high school.
One wonders why the UC system doesn't just admit students on a lottery system, as random admissions make at least as much sense as what they're doing now. To repeat:
The holistic review UC uses for admission that can count any number of factors that the admissions officers happen to find appealing is even more subjective than course grades.
Why, do you think it is, that they do that? We all know the answer.
Am I as a taxpayer getting my money's worth from funding the UC system in its current form? We probably know the answer to that, too.
Probably about 15 years ago, I read a story about a stellar student at an inner city L.A. school. He did everything at high school that he could, did everything that was asked of him, got top grades, valedictorian, and got accepted to Berkeley.
ReplyDeleteThen he nearly crashed and burned. For the first time, he was in classes with students from schools that asked much more of kids than his school ever had of him. He had weak study habits, and a weak learning background. Eventually, he noticed his roommate spending much more time studying than he was doing, and figured he should do that too. He survived and ended up doing well.
The glaring omission from the article was any discussion of what his test scores had been. We can, of course, speculate that they were poor, or the reporters would have talked about them.*
What bugs me most, is that the elimination of test scores on college apps probably has almost nothing to do with the types of students colleges want to admit, and everything to do with hiding the ball on how poor some K-12 school systems really are. If you refuse to look at any metric comparing the quality of districts, then everyone can pretend all our schools are above average.
This isn't so much the elimination of some numbers on apps, it's really the elimination of the pressure on K-12 districts to effectively teach.
-- Ann in L.A.
* A similar broader-scoped article was written in the Boston Globe about 3 years ago, following the district's valedictorians to see where they ended up. Most didn't come close to the potential of valedictorians at better schools. 25% hadn't finished college after 6 years. A third were making under $50k. A fourth of the 93 students followed wanted to become doctors, none of them made it, and only 2 even made it to med school. The Globe looked at suburban Boston valedictorians for comparison, and 12% had MDs.
The article, of course, also didn't talk about test scores.
The stories are individually heartbreaking, and as a whole, the article is a condemnation of education in the US:
https://apps.bostonglobe.com/magazine/graphics/2019/01/17/valedictorians/