A University of California advisory board suspended the much-celebrated planned review of the system’s admissions policies to bring back standardized testing requirements for undergraduate applicants. The decision of the academic senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools is not surprising to many of us who have been critical of the system in abandoning objective standards for admissions.
Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of the system’s academic senate, confirmed that the faculty group was ”revising its timeline” for ”a comprehensive review of standardized testing in admissions.”
As various schools reversed the disastrous abandonment of standardized testing, the California system continues to slow-walk the process. Many of the advocates of abandoning standardized testing to advance diversity in admissions are relatively silent in the face of falling academic standards. However, there was still a successful effort behind the scenes to delay any restoration.
As I have previously written, the University of California system was an early supporter of this disastrous move. It was heralded as a way to preserve diversity after voters in California repeatedly rejected race-based admissions and the Supreme Court appeared ready to bar such practices (commonly proven with reference to standardized test differentials among applicants).
Now, many professors in the California system have come to the same conclusion as some of us who denounced the move years ago. They have witnessed the drop in academic skills and abilities among incoming students.
The value of standardized testing was well established years ago. The claim that additional time is needed to contemplate the change is consistent with the university’s prior record. It previously studied the question and then ignored the findings to end the use of standardized testing.
These tests not only have the greatest predictive power for performance but also play an important role in advancing minority students. Former University of California President Janet Napolitano, however, overrode those conclusions.
Napolitano responded to such criticism with a Standardized Testing Task Force in 2019. Many people expected the task force to recommend the cessation of standardized testing. The task force did find that 59 percent of high school graduates were Latino, African-American, or Native American, but only 37 percent were admitted as UC freshman students. The Task Force did not find standardized testing to be unreliable or call for its abandonment, however.
Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.”
Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.”
In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.
That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted. So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions.
The system would go to a “test-blind” system until it developed its own test.
Ending standardized testing had an obvious secondary purpose: to frustrate new legal challenges to the use of race in college admissions.
We have also seen the dismal decline in standards at elite universities like Harvard, where faculty have been compelled to teach high school-level math classes to students.
Various schools have now reversed this ridiculous move pushed by faculty and administrators in the cause of racial diversity. The proponents of the change, such as Napolitano, have said little after they decimated the academic integrity and standing of their schools.
The UC faculty cited the UC San Diego Senate–Administration Workgroup on Admissions report, which found that 70 percent of these students are performing below a middle-school level.
Like Harvard, faculty are now teaching high-school-level math.
The trust of the new push to restore standardized testing has focused on STEM subjects. In a June 5 open letter, STEM faculty raised the alarm that UC has regularly admitted students who cannot complete college-level coursework.
UC Board Chair Maria Anguiano insisted that they just needed more time before reintroducing testing that it required by the vast majority of schools: “The goal of this review is not to rehash old questions or data but an opportunity to take a fresh look at how we define and evaluate college readiness in a rapidly changing world.”
For many critics, this comes off as a state academic system contemplating its collective navel as academic standards plummet. Neither the public nor many of the faculty want to continue on the terrible course taken under Napolitano. However, even on this easy and straightforward question, the faculty is dragging its feet to study the matter further — after previously disregarding the results of a study supporting standardized testing.