In recent years, many higher education institutions have abandoned standardized testing in their admissions processes or made these tests optional, arguing that SAT or ACT scores do not reliably project student performance and that these tests have built-in biases against underrepresented minorities (URMs). As of February 9, 2022, over 1,820 accredited U.S. colleges and universities do not require test scores for admissions, and 86 campuses are fully test-free. The movement to retire standardized testing is spearheaded by the union-funded non-profit National Center for Fair & Open Testing and backed by progressive education reformers.
But like many other equity-driven social initiatives that filter educational outcomes through a utilitarian, zero-sum lens, the test-blind movement is inherently flawed and deeply discriminatory. When it comes to the University of California (UC), the world’s most comprehensive and advanced postsecondary educational system, the process has translated into quantitatively significant penalties against one particular group of applicants: Asian Americans.
For two consecutive application cycles following the UC’s reform, the number of students admitted to UC Berkeley from the traditional feeder school Lynbrook High has been halved, going from 61 in 2019, to 26 in 2020, and to 22 in 2021. General admissions by Berkeley have also dropped for Henry M. Gunn Senior High, another known feeder school. Both schools are majority-Asian, 85% at Lynbrook and 44% at Gunn High, and both are high-performing schools in the top 5% category in the state in terms of math and reading proficiencies.
The same pattern of decline also applies to other majority-Asian elite high schools: between 2020 and 2021, the Asian-American acceptance rate at Berkeley declined from 22.3% to 14.6% in Mission San Jose High School (93% Asian), and from 16.2% to 11% in Monta Vista High School (80% Asian). Unsurprisingly, these large drops coincided with a historic milestone in representation and diversity. In July 2020, UC announced that it had admitted the most diverse class in its history, with Latino students comprising the largest ethnic group for the first time at 36% of the total freshmen. UC Berkley touted the biggest jump of all the campuses in admissions offers to URMs that year, paving its way to achieve its strategic goal of becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution. The effect of racial balancing is glaring.
As early as May 2020, to signal its willingness to accommodate applicants’ difficulties accessing testing centers during the COVID-19 pandemic, the UC Board of Regents voted unanimously to suspend the ACT/SAT requirement for Fall 2021 applicants. Despite cautions against abandoning the consideration of test scores from its own Academic Senate, UC kickstarted a multi-year process to phase out testing requirements altogether. In January 2021, the Board hatched a new plan to permanently eliminate the ACT/SAT requirement and make the California Smarter Balance 11th grade assessment optional. In November 2021, UC finalized the decision to go entirely test-blind, eschewing ACT/SAT scores and all other possible alternatives.
UC’s precipitous move against merit-based admissions was the result of a settlement in a student-led lawsuit alleging that the SAT and ACT illegally discriminated against low-income and minority students. The claim in the lawsuit is in line with the inflammatory assertion by the National Education Association (NEA) that standardized tests “have been instruments of racism and a biased system.” According to the student plaintiffs, the NEA, and other adherents to the test-free movement, both the race-based disparities in test performance and the broader achievement gaps are caused by systemic racism.
Such a claim simply can’t survive empirical scrutiny. Decades-long research has consistently shown that standardized test scores are accurate predictors for college readiness, student success, and career benchmarks such as bar passage for law school students. Moreover, the observed achievement gaps between different racial groups and between divergent income levels are not a result of racism or intentional discrimination, but of persistent failures at the K-12 level that disproportionately impact underserved students. In California, achievement gaps have persisted in spite of sweeping reforms and resource reallocation to help high-needs students. In 2019, according to the California Department of Education, math proficiency levels of black, Latino, white, and Asian students stood at 20.55%, 28.05%, 54.23%, and 74.37%, respectively. Reading proficiency levels for these groups were at 33.02%, 40.56%, 65.42%, and 76.86%.
Invalidating the hypothesis that low performance is a result of low income, a Stanford study finds that among all socioeconomically disadvantaged 8th graders, 57% of Asian-Americans, 31% of whites, 21% of Latinos, and 12% of blacks were able to acquire math proficiency. Among all economically disadvantaged 3rd graders, 55.53% of Asian-Americans, 44.74% of whites, 34.3% of Latinos, and 26.3% of blacks achieved reading proficiency.
Should we simply conclude that Asian Americans serendipitously wield more institutional power to get ahead in a system that is assumed to be inherently racist? What have they done to enable themselves to benefit from white supremacy?
[Related: “Anti-Asian Discrimination at the Heart of the Progressive Education Agenda”]
When more nuances are introduced into the picture, the disparities-equal-discrimination thesis becomes pseudo-science. Factors other than racism, including family culture, personal motivation, and community cohesiveness, are clearly at play. However, in the single-minded universe of anti-test “reformers,” such complex interdependence of multiple factors and conjunctures is inconceivable. If “leveling the playing field” requires undue discrimination against a minority group in the name of equity, so be it—call it a small cost of inconvenience in a bigger game for power and favoritism. This uncompromising rationale, avoidant of real policy solutions to lift up all participants in the K-12 pipeline, permeates the hasty case to phase out standardized tests.
Last year, my group Californians for Equal Rights Foundation started an initiative to collect stories and evidence from Asian-American parents and students who were denied admission by UC. Within a month, we had received dozens of submissions with astounding information about UC’s intentional discrimination in admissions. Some reported feeling confused and wronged after being turned down despite having a perfect SAT/ACT score, excellent GPA, and rich extracurriculars. One submission shared the story of a student who is half-Asian, grew up in a single parent, low-income home with his Korean mom, and was denied admissions by all UC medical schools. The parent lamented: “Something is drastically wrong when any low-income kid regardless of race with his merit isn’t admitted to [any school in the state].”
Image: Jeswin Thomas, Public Domain
Wow. Thanks
If one starts with “disparate impact” numbers and then dismisses that the cause of poor testing could be poor K-12 education, it begins to make sense that studies funded by teachers’ unions would result in blaming the tests and not the K-12 education. There is blame to go around–dysfunctional, violent neighborhoods–parents who openly denigrate the value of study and working at learning but allow countless hours for their children’s entertainment–“social justice” advocates teaching parents and children that our society is inherently racist, “so why should black and brown children learn “white math, white science”? When teachers join into this false narrative, they are teaching despair and fomenting hatred. Certainly, you don’t start with blaming the children–they are the products of their environment.
I taught Black kids (in majority Black schools, mostly). They are NOT stupid. They run the same range as any group of kids – and can accomplish as much as any of them.
The parents aren’t to blame when a kid who makes As and Bs gets to high school functionally illiterate or innumerate. The school system is. A strong focus on the basics – math, reading, writing, science (SCIENCE, not pseudo-scientific B$), and civics – would help the most.
In math, stop teaching “creative” ways to come up with the answers. Teach the well-tested methods. Stop wasting time trying to bring in Woke cr@p, and make sure:
(1) The lessons are clear, understandable, and have a measurable objective. That means, by the end of class, ALL the kids should be able to do the problems by themselves. Homework should provide more practice, but not introduce any new concepts. Assistance should be available via a cellphone video that walks kids – and their parents – through the same basics you introduced that day. And, YES, thanks to the Obamaphones, ALL families have access to the Net.
(2) No more grades for ‘effort’. The grades should be directly tied to the kids’ progress. The final grade should combine the work in class with performance on the standardized test at the end. None of the outcomes should come as a surprise to the families.
Is it easy?
Hell, no. But, it CAN be done.
The problem of racial disparities in academic performance is intractable. The educational reforms of the 1970s and 1980s did not ameliorate the problem. Neither did policies to increase funding, educational quality, and nutritional programs of minority communities and schools. And as to your claim about black kids – that “they run the same range as any group of kids” – this is simply uncorroborated by decades of empirical research, which has demonstrated, unambiguously and unequivocally, that Ashkenazi Jews deliver the highest academic performance, followed by East Asians, whites, latinos, and blacks. This evident hierarchy of academic performance also happens to perfectly align with the average IQ of each of these groups. There is a protracted and complicated discussion to be had about the convolutions of IQ, its genetic and environmental causes (overwhelmingly the former), its relation to academic attainment as a predictor of performance (in which it is unrivaled in its potency), and what can be done to increase it in individuals, let alone populations significantly and stably (this is virtually impossible).
People differ in their innate abilities and there is no reason to suppose that variance of this sort is absent between groups and populations; in fact, there is a surfeit of evidence upholding the contrary.
Tests like the SAT and ACT were devised to allow students from many places to have a single method of comparison of their abilities. While some cultural loading is present on the tests, this is minimal. Students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds will be harmed by eliminating tests. Those concerned about doing well on a test should do simple things – read a whole bunch, summarize your reading, and work on your test-taking strategies.
Wasn’t the SAT developed to END racial discrimination?
As I understand it, the Ivy League was familar with WASP applicants coming from prep schools they knew had applicants coming from public schools they’d never heard of. Hence an aptitude test.
This is my understanding as well… but when the tests didn’t generate the desired outcome (facilitating racial quotas) our social engineers determined that they had to go…
Not only is it unfair to the Asians, it’s unfair to the minorities whom it ostensibly helps. I see this in my intro STEM classes, when obviously underqualified members of minorities, usually black, fail miserably, despite often putting in a tremendous effort. The fact is they didn’t have much of a chance, and the system is designed that way. That is the real systemic racism. And then we have meetings with “administrators” who are actually professional support staff, where we discuss the higher fail rate of these groups. And when we ask about standardized entry test scores, the SAT and ACT, the information is not available, and not only because the tests are no longer required. The info is not there even for those many students who take the tests. The university is willfully blind. And it is being very cruel to these students.
Let’s not forget a good portion of the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of these black students. You can’t tell me they aren’t fully aware of the fact they have poor reading skills and virtually no math skills. They have no business enrolling in a STEM degree program.
How are they to know they lack basic skills? Who has told them that?
Actually, I have to argue that you are wrong. Grade inflation and the pretense that some kids are “poor test takers” leaves many families truly thinking that they are doing well.
Think about it. The students with poor skills manage to function in their normal lives just fine. They are generally competent at household chores, managing travel through their city, negotiating interpersonal communications, and handling other everyday tasks. Many of them are gifted in music, art, or dance. Their families see them as competent. It can be really difficult to persuade their parents that the kids need special help. I’ve heard many times, “He’s not Special Ed!”, which, for the families implies inability to function in life.
I, too, teach STEM. We don’t usually have a problem in upper level classes. However, in the ‘101’ classes, I have students who literally can’t do basic arithmetic or read an introductory text. These deficiencies are directly correlated with the race of the students. Hence, the failure rate in lower level classes is skewed by race, as indicated in the original article.
We undoubtedly have racists among our faculty and student body — we can’t deny this. However, the inability to do basic arithmetic or read an introductory text has absolutely nothing to do the existence of racist individuals. And the discrimination against people of ability because of the race of the people of ability is racism, pure and simple.
I don’t advocate admission policies based entirely on merit. But it seems to me that rejection policies should be based on lack of merit. It does no one any good to admit applicants to college who can’t do the work.