On May 14, 2021, the University of California entered into an out-of-court settlement. It agreed to suspend the use of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the American College Test (ACT) as criteria for admission to the state’s university system. Many in the system thought it was a mistake, but couldn’t quantify their fears. Only now can the consequences of that decision be accurately measured, and the answer isn’t good. Regardless, the university system has decided to stick to this disastrous policy until at least 2028.
At the time of the settlement, the plaintiffs, represented by a “nonprofit public interest law firm” called Public Counsel, were ecstatic. They began their announcement with an effusion of woke vocabulary and half-truth.
“Today, plaintiffs in Smith v. Regents of the University of California reached a historic settlement with the University, broadening access to UC campuses for students across the State by eliminating consideration of the SAT and ACT from admissions and scholarship decisions. Despite condemning the SAT and ACT as racist tests, the Regents voted in May 2020 to continue using those tests in University admissions and scholarship decisions for another two years.”
Racist Exams
The charges that the tests were racist went back at least to the mid-eighties. The proof was that the SAT had demonstrated its racist tendencies by asking the definition of the word “regatta.” The argument went that only white students had any chance of ever having used that word. Therefore, the question was a vehicle to exclude black and other minority students.
I first heard this harangue in graduate school about 1985. I was mildly amused by the indignation which the speaker, a professor in the school of education, poured into her denunciation. Having been a student in a community college and two universities over the previous decade, I knew that all three schools bent over backward to admit “students of color.” Second, I was an almost-thirty-year-old white man who had only the vaguest idea of what a regatta was. Surely, most of those with whom I had gone to school were in the same situation. Depending on how the question was phrased, I might have gotten it wrong, too. This was clearly, I rapidly determined, a tempest in a teapot.
Alas, that teapot would boil repeatedly throughout the next four decades. The tests, on the flimsiest of evidence, had been determined to be racist – and racist they would stay, no matter what corrective actions the test administrators took to remove the traces of racism that the word regatta implied.
Today, you are less likely to hear the regatta argument. After all that happened over forty years ago, our collective memory is weak. Over the past couple of decades, you were more likely to hear that upper-middle-class kids were more likely to be able to afford “expensive tutoring” before the exam; a fault that many schools have tried to fill by hosting free SAT prep classes of their own.
Conversation with an Anti-Test “Expert”
The New York Post recently ran an editorial by John Stossel, in which he related a conversation he had with Bob Schaffer, executive director of the anti-testing group FairTest. Mr. Stossel argued that, with all their faults, the SATs are still the best predictor of whether a student will do well in college.
“He [Mr. Schaffer] scoffed at that, saying testing companies just want money.
“I pushed back: ‘If you’re a Latino immigrant who goes to a lousy high school but you test well, you’ve got a shot.’
“‘There are actually very few examples of that being true,’ he replied.
“Actually, there are many examples. College Board data shows students with C+ grades but great SAT scores do better in college than A+ students with lower SAT scores.”
The Test-Free World
Indeed, the available data determines, with a fair degree of accuracy, which students are ready for college and which are not. That, not the thin charges of racism, was the real reason that the leftists hated them. Such hierarchical and meritocratic thinking is verboten in the wokester’s world of equity.
Now, as the saying goes, those hens have come home to roost. Some of the evidence can be seen in a mathematics professor’s cri de cœur, printed in The San Francisco Standard. The title went straight to the point. “I Teach Calculus at Berkley. Some of My Students Can’t Do Middle School Math.” A few paragraphs down, the author, Zvezdelina Stankova (PhD, Harvard, 1997), relates a personal experience.
“Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics.”
Unprepared Students
There are few experiences more frustrating than being a student in a class for which you are woefully unprepared. Your head swims in a world of words you barely comprehend, and you know that, no matter how hard you work, you just don’t have the background even to understand the basics.
Perhaps reading a paragraph from Dr. Stankova’s Wikipedia biography will help readers understand such students’ dilemma. “In the theory of permutation patterns, Stankova is known for proving that the permutations with the forbidden pattern 1342 are equinumerous with the permutations with forbidden pattern 2413, an important step in the enumeration of permutations avoiding a pattern of length 4.”
If you understand any words in that paragraph other than those of two or three letters, you are ahead of me.
Being the teacher of such a student is only slightly less disheartening. Both the student and the teacher know the student is in the wrong place; neither can do much about it. If the deficit is slight, a few hours in the professor’s office or with a tutor can clear it up, but that is not what we are talking about here. When the student is “five to eight years behind,” only two outcomes are possible: either the teacher gives the student a ridiculous passing grade, or the student fails.
Time to Correct the Error
Throughout the last half-century, the leftists who run so many of our schools have demonstrated that ridiculous passing grades are exactly what they want. During my thirty-four-year teaching career, I sat through many meetings where administrators or paid consultants tried to convince me and all of the other teachers there that an overemphasis on grades turned classrooms into holding pens for demotivated kids. These poor students, the theory went, were so overwhelmed by failure that they had no idea that they could succeed. A caring teacher, they condescended to tell us, would know that giving a kid a higher grade would motivate them to ever greater levels of achievement.
The mathematics professors in California provide a badly needed service by telling us how well that experiment has worked.
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