The University of California should continue to require that applicants for undergraduate admission take standardized college admissions tests like the SAT and ACT, a key faculty task force has recommended.
Notably, the task force did not recommend that UC shut the door permanently to making the test optional for applicants to UC’s nine campuses that admit undergraduates. (The University of California at San Francisco, the system’s 10th campus, is a medical school, and only admits students for postgraduate study.)
Instead, it recommended that UC conduct additional research on the possibility of making the test optional before deciding “whether and how to implement such a policy.”
In January last year, the Academic Senate representing UC faculty established an 18-member Standardized Testing Task Force, at the request of UC president Janet Napolitano. It was asked to evaluate “without prejudice or presupposition” whether the university and students are “best served by our current testing practices.”
The tasks force’s dense 226 page report was issued on Monday morning, and was scheduled be discussed at a teleconference Monday afternoon.
The use of standardized admissions tests has been a subject of ongoing debate and discussion at the university for decades. In recent years it has been the target of increasing criticism, including that the tests discriminate against historically disadvantaged students who don’t get the preparation they need to do well on the test.
The task force said it did not find that “UC’s use of test scores played a major role in worsening the effects of disparities already present among applicants.”
To the contrary, the task force concluded that UC’s admissions process “helped to make up for the potential adverse effect of score differences between groups.”
The task force’s report, which is expected to be hugely influential, is not the final word on the issue. The report will now go to the entire Academic Senate for input from faculty systemwide. The Academic Senate will then make a recommendation to UC president Napolitano, who will in turn make a recommendation to the UC Board of Regents in May for it to make a final decision.
The task force’s recommendations ran contrary to the views of several top UC officials, including UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ, who have argued in favor of eliminating the use of the admissions tests.
The task force concluded that UC’s current admissions practices, based on a system of “comprehensive review” of a student’s background, already take into account “students’ contexts” when evaluating their test scores. It noted that applicants from “less advantaged backgrounds are admitted at higher rates for any given test scores as a result of comprehensive review.”
Many critics of the test have argued that admissions should be based more on high school grades than on test scores, and that those grades are a better predictor of college success than admissions tests. But the task force found that test scores already receive less weight in admissions than high school grades.
While arguing for preserving the use of the ACT and SAT, the task force did make several recommendations that UC reform its current admission’s system “to ensure that the population of admitted students reflects the diversity of the state.”
These include reviewing and updating the statewide index used to identify UC-eligible students, and expanding what is known as the ” Eligibilty in Local Context (ELC)” which admits students in the top 9 percent of each high school based on their high school grades alone.
There has been considerable discussion about adopting the 11th grade Smarter Balanced Assessment administered to high school students in lieu of the SAT and ACT. However, the task force recommended against this possibility, saying it is “deeply concerned with a wide range of risks” that the university would expose itself to if it adopted the Smarter Balanced test as an admission requirement. These include test security, inconsistent implementation of the Smarter Balanced test across states, and a range of technical and other concerns.
