The parents of the SAT scandal must be kicking themselves now. They turned themselves into convicted felons for the rest of their life for an SAT that no longer exists.
Cost really shouldnât be a factor anymore. Old practice tests are available to anyone effectively for free through Google, and the current tests have a lot of the same type of problem sets. And reading comprehension is just improved by reading, as well as writing by writing.
It does take some effort to sit in a room for four hours to try to duplicate the tests and to go over all the problems one gets wrong in a meticulous manner to try to improve, and then to duplicate this a handful of times, but independent-study skills are extremely invaluable for college, where there isnât going to be someone watching over a student to make sure he or she studies.
The UC is way off base. There isnât anything that it can administer that will take the place of the College Board or the ACT because these two are in the business of test-taking. If UC goes by just grades, thereâs going to be more five-, six-, and seven-year graduations, and where will UC be then?
And what will happen is the students who send in high and lofty scores with high grades will still grab the top majors because none of the elites will follow UCâs lead, and those who donât send in scores will be because they have much to hide and be relegated to Sociology and whatever else either by advising or a self-realization, because they will have tried to take a chem or bio course and found that they donât have the background to understand complex material.
This is the equivalent of driving the final nail into a coffin with a pile driver.
Dear CB,
We regret to inform you that itâs not youâŠitâs usâŠwe wish you luck in all your future endeavors.
All the best,
~California
Exactly. US News rankings also take into account graduation rates, so this may not go quite the way the UCs are planning. On the other hand, I wouldnât be surprised if their purported plans change in a year or two. Nothing is set in stone.
Some of those parents had a ârecruited athleteâ angle, like fake sailing, rowing and soccer credentials.
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That is NOT what the UC Academic Senate said: " some members of the powerful UC Academic Senate, which sets admission standards, said they were disheartened by what they saw as disregard of their research report on standardized testing, which Napolitano requested in 2018.
In what researchers called surprising findings, the Academic Senateâs review found that the SAT helps disadvantaged students gain entry to the selective UC system. Thatâs because the way UC uses standardized test scores substantially corrects for bias by weighting them less heavily than grades and considering them as only one of many factors in the review process. Campuses adjust for socioeconomic differences and admit disadvantaged students with lower test scores compared with more advantaged peers.
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Eddie Comeaux, a UC Riverside professor who heads the Senateâs committee on admission standards and co-chaired the testing task force, said politics and public perceptions more than data appeared to drive the decision to a preordained conclusion." from https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-21/uc-drops-sat-and-act-test-requirement-for-admission.
âIn what researchers called surprising findings, the Academic Senateâs review found that the SAT helps disadvantaged students gain entry to the selective UC system. Thatâs because the way UC uses standardized test scores substantially corrects for bias by weighting them less heavily than grades and considering them as only one of many factors in the review process. Campuses adjust for socioeconomic differences and admit disadvantaged students with lower test scores compared with more advantaged peers.â
The review of test scores is heavily adjusted based on location/high school. Sampling my Sâs friends, a ~1300 SAT is seen as an excellent score in the Central Valley and in combination with decent ECs and a near 4.0 GPA will get you into UCLA and Berkeley. My Sâs friend with these scores is a great student and was easily top in her HS (and now has a 4.0 at UCLA). In our Silicon Valley district the same scores usually get you an automatic rejection from both. Students in my kids school with these scores werenât even close to the best students in the class - they were viewed as hard working but not very smart. Thatâs unsurprising when the SV students had taken it 4-5 times and had two years of weekly private SAT prep classes, when the Central Valley students took it once, cold, with zero prep.
Thatâs why the lower end of the 25-75 SAT range seems so low to your typical well off parent/student on CC. But it wonât be relevant to their application.
Many colleges use Accuplacer, ALEKS for math is widespread; tests for chemistry, physics, foreign language are already mandatory during or before freshman orientation.
What about CLEP for history and/or English?
=> tadam, youâve got tests that already exist, no need to reinvent the wheel.
The goal of the test could simply be to cut anyone who canât do the work at the university, adjusted per major (so that a low score in math wouldnât impact an English major as long as they reached a âpassingâ score, but would impact an Engineering major). Once that has been checked, test scores donât matter, only the other factors (such as GPA, curriculum rigor, ECâs, essays, recs, all evaluated within context).
That is a direct quote from a woman who I thought was one of the Regents at the meeting yesterday. I donât know her name. If you search that quote on Twitter the clip comes up.
I think the confusion lies in the fact that the regents are a different body than the academic senate and they are opposed to each other on this issue. The academic senate wanted to keep the standardized testing. The regents, mostly, were the ones who wanted to do away with it.
Yes, I understand that. I read most of the several hundred page Academic Senate report in March. The important thing is that the Board of Regents is the ultimate decision maker.
How are admissions committees making these adjustments (âsocioeconomic differences and admit disadvantaged students with lower tests scoresâ) if they are need-blind? Are they doing it by zip code or HS? And if so, is that really need blind?
@Mwfan1921 I knew you knew about the difference â the other poster sounded as if he/she might not have known or misinterpreted your posts.
As I understand it, for in-state students, they look at all applicants from a high school together and rank them in order for admissions purposes as a cross-check on the rating that is assigned by each application reader (though a lower ranked L&S applicant may get admitted when a higher ranked Eng applicant doesnât).
I suspect that there is also an approximate number of places allocated to each region/county of California so that sets the cutoff on a high school by high school basis. So for example we see in Silicon Valley that it is relatively easier to get into Berkeley than UCLA, which seems to be because more places are allocated to the local region.
None of this has to be need aware at an individual level. And the allocation of places by region can be (and apparently is) adjusted to favor students in more disadvantaged parts of the state. The key thing that the SAT then helps with is how to identify the best students within a high school or within a region.
But thatâs the thing, there is very limited data that SAT identifies the best students, or those most likely to succeed in college, or in predicting college GPA.
The data show that SAT scores are very good at predicting an applicantâs family income.
I agree with some of the above comments. Also, eliminating the SAT/ACT is a way to undermine Prop. 209. Since the passage of Prop. 209, less underrepresented minorities were admitted to UCâs, but their graduation rates increased (perhaps they were better prepared for college). Many decades, ago, Asians had to overcome many obstacles, including bias on standardized tests, to gain admission to top schools. As generations passed, they figured out their deficiencies and worked diligently to overcome them. If Asians, as the modelled minority, can overcome these barriers, other minorities should be able to do it too. The appointed leaders and the groups who want to eliminate the SAT/ACT are âcry babiesâ.
For me, itâs less about the SAT itself and more about the College Board and how it can literally do anything (see this yearâs AP exams) and people are still going to have to take their tests and give them money. The only other option is the ACT, but if you want any college credit (are colleges even going to give credit this year??) you HAVE to take AP tests for 100 dollars each.
There is always dual enrollment, which is what my girls have done. They go to a school that only offers 3 AP classes, which was fine by us. They love their dual enrollment courses and they are getting tons of credits for college out of the way. They also both self studied for AP Calc AB, and took it for credit so they could place into Calc II at cc. So, there are ways around the AP tests â if one is determined to figure it out.
Teacher here who has proctored many many standardized tests over the past two decades (PSAT, SAT, and many various state-mandated tests).
My thoughts?
In most states there are some sort of standardized competency testing at the HS level. In CA it is the California High School Proficiency Examination https://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/tg/sp/ in Texas it is the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness https://tea.texas.gov/student-assessment/testing/staar/staar-resources and so forth. These standardized tests are already mandatory in most states and schools already set aside time for them in class. They also cover both ELA and Math just like the SAT and ACT.
A much more sensible college admissions process would be to convert these exams into dual purpose HS competency and college admissions exams. That way students would take them much more seriously (which isnât always the case) and students could avoid the whole SAT/ACT racket. If, as every state actually says, these HS standardized tests are a measure of âcollege readinessâ then letâs use them for that purpose. If they need to be re-designed to curve higher then that can easily be done. Students will still get a numeric score that will place them in a certain percentile ranking for their school, county, state, etc.
Isnât that the sticking point for the faculty senate study though? Their study showed that higher SAT scores correlated with better graduation outcomes and higher UC gpas.
Iâm sure that SAT scores correlate to income to a certain (relatively small) extent, but Iâd bet the correlation is better if you controlled for which families are more supportive academically. The Varsity Blues parents had income coming out of the ying-yang, but their kids couldnât score well on the SAT to save their lives apparently. To me, itâs more about how willing and able families are to have their kids do the hard work it takes to excel. We are a middle class family that places priority on academics. Our girls have worked hard for their grades and test scores, and it has paid off. They did not take any fancy test prep or get tutoring. But I did read to them every night from the time they were babies, and I homeschooled them through middle school with high quality materials paid for by the local homeschool charter. Their scores and grades would probably outshine the scores of the Varsity Blues kids and we are not anywhere close to their level of privilege or wealth.
I get that lower income families may not have the means or ability to give their kids adequate academic support. This is kind of where I think our country as a whole needs to really think about how much we, as a nation, value education.
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And then thereâs the question of whether those credits are transferable to when you actually go to college.