If that’s their actual goal, UC might be on thin ice here, given the text of Proposition 209:
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I think that the reason that many people assume that test scores are more accurate than GPA as assessment of students is that, in aggregate, that can be true. So the average SAT scores of a school can tell us a lot about how well that school is preparing those kids for the SAT tests, which is correlated to how well they are preparing their students for college.
On the other hand, average GPAs tell us less about the school, since they are more strongly related to the grading practices of the school.
However (and a big one), admissions is NOT about aggregates, it is about individuals. An orchestra will not accept a person based on the average playing abilities of the community from where this person comes, and a football team does not care about the average size and skill of the highschool which their potential players attended.
HSGPA is about what a student did in context of where they were and what they had available. A high GPA, relative to their high school, tells us that they did well, given the resources that were available. GPA tells us the 3.5 year story of a student in a school, and will tell us a lot about what their four years at college will look like.
SAT scores, on the other hand, tell us little about the individual, since many local and often temporary factors can affect individuals. A bad day, tests anxiety, the fact that a student has a needed IED or lack that accommodation, whether a student had breakfast or a good night’s sleep, etc. The SATs tell us the story of that day in that specific student’s life, which tells us little about how their four years in college will look.
The SATs were, historically, very beneficial to colleges when colleges did not care about diversity, because they were recruiting in aggregate. Moreover, since SAT scores are correlated with income, it allowed them to focus their recruitment efforts on higher SES kids, who would pay more in tuition (and likely be better donors in the future). The higher average SAT scores also looked good on the college’s brochure.
That has been the whole issue of diversity in colleges for decades. At least since the early 20th century, the problem has not really been that the wealthy kids that were accepted were not qualified. The problem is that colleges were not accepting any applicants from the vast number of qualified lower and middle SES. Use of standardized testing makes solving this problem much more difficult.
Use of testing also ignores the wide variation in the ability to perform well on standardized, multiple choice, single, high stakes tests. This is not a skill which is particularly useful in the vast majority of careers, and yet this is a skill which has historically determined admissions to colleges which are the gateways to many of these careers.
This last is why even the comparison of a student’s score to those of the other students from their school is not all that useful.
Finally, as I have repeatedly said - standardized tests do not test for the skills that are required for succeeding in college. Most classes are not graded by a single, multiple choice test at the end of the year. So the ability to do well on that type of test does not tell us much about the ability of that student to do well in college.
PS. In come careers, like medicine and law, the type of skills that help in scoring highly on standardized tests are needed, which is why LSATs and MCATs are very useful, and should be kept. However, for a PhD, these skills are useless, so GREs are even more worthless than SATs and ACTs.
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“And again, the question is, to what end? Why are test scores necessary to meet the UC mission described above? There are other mechanisms by which schools can identify standout students in generally low performing schools without the baggage of test scores.”
I’d love to see the ‘other mechanisms’ that UC can use to find ‘standout’ engineering or other pre-quant students without compromising graduating rates in their hoped for majors. (Doesn’t do any good to accept an engineering major and have them transfer out to L&S bcos of poor grades in Frosh Calc.) And yes, I know, L&S does not admit by major, but admitting a bunch of low math ability premeds means a bunch of kids have very low chance of high grades in the STEM courses, and thus, near zero chance of med/health school.
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So colleges should get rid of the PSAT while they are at it.
Why don’t CA schools look at CA CAASP (smarter balance) tests in their assessment?
Why is it UCs are ok with getting the test scores (after being accepted) for class placement but it’s not telling of a student’s readiness (like @bluebayou mentions) for engineering prospects?
The UCs did not get rid of test scores for class placement. Instead placement tests are required. For example, bluebayou mentioned freshman calculus in her post above. Students at UCs take a math placement test to help determine most appropriate math starting point. There are also other placement tests in other areas such as writing, science, and foreign language; with a good amount variation at different campuses. Placement tests are not specific to test optional/blind colleges. Nearly all highly selective Ivy+ type colleges required placement tests prior to going test optional, which were often far more involved with more possible math starting points and levels than the ones offered at UCs.
The reasons for such placement tests partially relate to the reducing the switching out of major behavior described above being most correlated with quality and rigor of HS preparation after sufficient controls – not HS GPA or SAT score (things like personal characteristics, gender, and harshness of grading are also often relevant for switching out of engineering). Students who take rigorous AP math/science classes that have a good deal of overlap with freshman math/science tend to struggle less in freshman math/science. Students who come from weaker HS math/science backgrounds tend to struggle more to catch up in freshman year, which can lead to switching out of math/science heavy majors. UC math placement exams can suggest as low as taking a refresher pre-calculus class, if the student is especially poorly prepared.
Note that UC does not admit solely by HS GPA as suggested by numerous posts. They still consider things like rigor of HS classes (including things like number of and score on AP/IB/college level), upward/downward trend, whether the applicant is within top 9% of local HS (grade inflation), whether the student comes from a background that has academic/EC opportunities, “sustained achievement in any field of intellectual or creative endeavor”, various personal qualities, etc. Multiple sources suggest UC has already been admitting students while placing little weight on SAT I / ACT for quite some time.
While I expect UC has the ability to identify which students come from the strongest HS background and are least likely to switch out of engineering to a similar degree as they could with SAT/ACT I score, they won’t necessarily strongly favor such students. UC has many admission goals besides just choosing kids who are least likely to switch out of engineering, who are overrepresented among well resourced HSs in wealthy areas. I also haven’t seen any numbers suggesting whether switching out of majors is a big problem. I suspect that students who are admitted to an especially selective UC major like engineering or CS will be more reluctant to switch out on a single B+ type grade than we often see at HYPS… type private colleges, with more open major admission/enrollment.
Studies of test optional colleges do not suggest a problem with low college GPA being a key blocker for med/health school. For example, I previously posted stats for the 25 years of test optional at Bates, which are repeated below. The test optional kids didn’t have notably lower GPAs at Bates. The previously linked NACAC controlled for STEM vs non-STEM and there was only a small ~0.1 average GPA difference between test optional and submitters in STEM classes at the >20 colleges. However, the test optional kids at Bates and various other colleges did have a lower rate of matriculating to medical school. The issue was more lower MCAT score than low grades. Students who do poorly on SAT/ACT are more likely to do poorly on the MCAT. Test submitter kids also had a larger portion of students who expressed an interest in med/health school as entering freshman than test optional kids.
25 Year Averages at Bates
Test Submitters – 3.16 mean GPA, 89% graduation rate
Non-Submitters – 3.13 mean GPA, 88% graduation rate
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The days when standardized test scores can be used to help distinguish top students in some ways have long gone, primarily because the same force that opposes testing today favored and caused the tests to become less discriminating to begin with. After they succeeded making the tests less useful for that purpose, they now argue that tests are practically useless. I’m looking forward to the days when the same force will argue that HSGPAs are meaningless in college admissions once HSGPAs are so inflated that they lose any remaining discriminating power they may still have today. Life is full of ironies.
The utility of the tests today, while less discriminating, lies in their sectional/component scores (which are how most colleges use them these days). A college would think twice when it’s faced with a decision whether to admit an applicant with a 650 math score to one of its more quantitative majors, for example.
MCAT and LSAT have already been discussed and I know less about them so I won’t opine on them. I do know a bit about GREs, though. The reason they aren’t useful to the top PhD programs is because the applicants to these programs have much more distinguishing academic records (including research experiences) that make these tests unnecessary. Few HS students have similarly distinguishing academic records (for those few, they don’t need SAT/ACT either). BTW, masters programs (and PhD programs that aren’t top tier) generally do require GREs, precisely because their applicants don’t necessarily all possess the same level of distinguishing academic records.
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The LSAT and MCAT are also specially targeted toward law and medicine as fields of study, while the GRE, SAT, and ACT are non-specific.
Doubtful. The retargeting of the SAT “downward” (e.g. the 1994 recentering) probably has more to do with the College Board finding more of a market in the larger number of college applicants at the moderately selective college admissions level than at the highly selective college admissions level. There would not be much of a market for the SAT if it were so difficult that it could meaningfully distinguish between students in the admit class of Caltech, for example. But it is unlikely that the same College Board wants to encourage colleges to go SAT optional or not used.
The process of making standardized tests less discriminating has been long and gradual, and isn’t limited to the 1994 SAT re-centering. The force that is in favor of eliminating these tests is the same one that thinks the tests and grades (in both HS’s and colleges) shouldn’t be so discriminating that they can be used to “compare students”. They’re the ones who argue that all students who are admitted based on the most subjective measures are equally “qualified”. Students who barely passed a class have all “mastered the materials”. And so on.
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I think the recent Public Counsel lawsuit suggests that UC is probably on thin ice no matter which direction it skates.
But attempts to “create a student body that is representative of the demographic profile of California” don’t necessarily violate Prop 209. The “demographic profile of California” consists of many other factors other than “race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” For example, Prop 209 doesn’t preclude consideration of geographic or socioeconomic factors or family educational background.
So, to clarify the question: How would requiring test scores help UC create a student body that is representative of California’s demographics, other than race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin?
As previously discussed, almost half of UC STEM graduates transferred from California Community College. While some of these community college students may have scored a 650+ on the math portion of the SAT as high school students, others didn’t even bother to take the test, and overall they don’t seem to fit the profile of the high scoring students you describe.
For example, here are the “Enrollment Priorities” for entry into the Science and Research Initiative (SRI) - STEM Program at SMC, a top Ca Community College:
- Complete SMC Application
- Minimum of 2 years of high school science
- Math 20-ready (Intermediate Algebra or higher) by Fall 2021
- Recommended ~2.50 High School GPA
- Interest in one of the STEM fields
- Planned Fall 2021 enrollment in Math and Science courses
It isn’t necessary to score a 650+ in math to excel in STEM, nor is it necessary to have studied math through Diff EQ in high school, or to have competed internationally in math and/or science.
The SAT is not an aptitude test. It measures what students have learned in the past, not necessarily what they would be capable of learning had they access to a World Class education.
do we really think essays are the way colleges can assess their applicants holistically? and that families with more money won’t just game this system as well and hire essay helpers? every aspect of the application process can be manipulated. at least with the SAT a motivated poor student had a chance of doing independent test prep and shining on it.
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What unnamed “force” is this that you claim existed for such a long time and has had the power you believe it had and still has in this aspect? (As opposed to the College Board moving the SAT “downmarket” for its own business reasons as larger numbers of high school graduates went to college.)
If UC wanted to use test scores in conjunction with geographic location or SES, or both, it could neutralize test scores for these or other factors through a simple multivariate regression (I suspect that there are a few thousand people in the UC system with the background to do this correctly). UC could then use those test scores to determine which students are more likely to succeed within an SES stratum or geographic location.
I recognize that a state university system has multiple goals. If UC has a ranking system that ends up overwhelmingly admitting students from the Bay Area and private schools in LA, then it clearly is not serving the needs of California as a whole. On the other hand, a strong student from Palo Alto high school should not be subject to much higher admission requirements than someone from a lower performing school district. It’s a balancing act because at the end of the day, it is a zero-sum game.
'Studies of test optional colleges do not suggest a problem with low college GPA being a key blocker for med/health school. For example, I previously posted stats for the 25 years of test optional at Bates, which are repeated below. "
With a sn of ‘data’, I hope you are not seriously inferring that the Bates experience could be/will be representative of the top UC campuses say, in Engineering.
The quote you copied in your post talks about MCAT being more likely to be a barrier for test optional pre-med kids rather than GPA. The point is lower standardized test scores tend to be correlated with another, so lower SAT/ACT is more likely to correlate with lower MCAT score than GPA, after controls for criteria used in test optional/blind admission. Persisting in an engineering major is not associated with a MCAT/LSAT type barrier, like med/law school admission. Separately the post discusses what factors do contribute to attrition from an engineering major, which have nothing to do with the Bates comments or the sentence in your quote.
Regarding extrapolation from a single small college, the post did not do this. Instead you chose to ignore the word “studies” (plural) in your quote and the post’s reference the NACAC study of 20 colleges that controlled for STEM vs non-STEM and came to a similar conclusion as the Bates study. The NACAC study compared the average cumulative GPA of STEM majors who were test submitter admits and test optional admits. Test submitter STEM kids at those 20 colleges averaged a ~3.3 GPA, and test optional kids averaged ~3.2. The test submitter enrolled kids averaged a ~0.05 higher HS GPA than test optional kids, and the test submitter STEM kids averaged a ~0.1 higher college GPA than than the test optional STEM kids. There is a link to the full PDF earlier in the thread. It also references an earlier study of 13 colleges that came to the same conclusion. It’s not just Bates that shows relatively little difference in both GPA and graduation rate between test submitter admits and test optional admits…
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The U of C is going to fill tens of thousands of slots this year without any SAT guardrail. It will be taking kids who were able to manipulate their GPAs but would not have been able to land a matching SAT score as a check on the GPA. Even public school administrators will have a HUGE incentive to inflate grades, and those schools that do not inflate grades will be punished by lower enrollment in the U of C system, particularly at the top schools in the system.
How can the U of C system guarantee that high schools will not inflate grades when the U of C system is basically telling them to inflate grades?
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PSAT isn’t for colleges - it’s a competition for high school kids.
I gave my opinion as to the use of tests for admissions. I do not work for the UC system, and am not privy to the factors that went into those decisions. If you want to know the answers to these questions, you should contact the people at the UC system who are responsible for making those decisions.
That is true, and that is another reason why they are useful.
However, subject GREs are no better at predicting success for PhD students than are the general GRE tests.
Subject SAT tests do a better job than the general SAT test at predicting success in college, but still fall short of HSGPA.
Do you actually think scoring 650 on a SAT math test is similar to having taken differential equations in high school? SAT math is about as basic as there is in math. Math, along with the more quantitative fields in sciences and engineering, are very hierarchical. A student simply can’t acquire more advanced skills without the basic skills.
BTW, not all fields in STEM are highly quantitative and some fields outside of STEM are also highly quantitative. Can a student without basic math skills succeed in some less quantitative fields in STEM? Perhaps. Can a student without basic math skills succeed in a highly quantitative field (STEM or non-STEM)? Very unlikely and rare, but there’re always a few exceptions (as in almost everything else).
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Bates College is a wonderful NE LAC, but expecting their TO process to be representative of a no test UC process??? hmmmm
Per the NYT a few years ago:
" The median family income of a student from Bates is $226,500, and 76% come from the top 20 percent. Less than 1% of students at Bates came from a poor family…"
The biggest problem I see is that there are still students today that fall through the cracks when it comes to a base standardized test score (like 650+ on Math section of the SAT) due to what @BKSquared mentioned up thread (Vast differences in K-12 education provided throughout the US). Back in 1993, I was able to get a 750 on the Math section of the SAT coming from an impoverished background, but the fact that I was identified as having some academic potential early, along with attending magnet schools for middle and high school that gave me an opportunity. There are many kids who have that same potential throughout the US who do not have the same options. My guess is that I would have been “capped” around a 600/24 Math section SAT/ACT at my zoned school (which is what the top students at my zoned school received), not because I could not do the “basic math” of the SAT, but because I would not have ever been exposed to the math needed to excel. In 2021, I see some differences (especially around the amount of times the SAT/ACT are taken, and the differences in targeted prep between those with and without financial means) that makes the SAT/ACT as bloated in some cases as the High School GPAs that have been mentioned often on this thread.
My own stance is that I would prefer that standardized testing results were still available to review, but I believe that too much emphasis has been placed on their importance in the past (it should be reviewed through a very narrow lens), which has made the transition to remove standardized testing from consideration possible in the 1st place.
I have seen this happen much more than you would think. My HBCU (Morehouse College) does not have an engineering program so students end up in a 3/2 program sending our Engineering students to other schools with Georgia Tech being the school receiving the most Morehouse engineering students (U of Michigan also receives our prospective engineering students yearly). Most of those students come into Morehouse with a Math SAT score (or ACT equivalent) below 650, but by the time those students have reached the Georgia Tech portion of their education, they are ready to excel at one of the top STEM schools in the country. It all comes back to the gaps in the K-12 education system.
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