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By Scott Street Daily Bruin Senior Staff While graduate-level entrance exams like the LSAT, MCAT and GRE haven’t faced the same amount of criticism the SAT has in recent years, some administrators say those tests are becoming less important to students’ admission hopes. “In the distant past, many admissions committees took the MCAT and GPA as prominent decision-makers,” said Dr. Neil Parker, senior associate dean of student affairs and graduate medical education in the UCLA School of Medicine. “There is a lower degree of importance now.” But try telling that to a student taking the upcoming LSAT, GRE or MCAT. No matter what administrators think, many students feel admissions decisions hinge on these scores. “From what I hear, it’s a good indicator of whether you’ll be successful or not,” said Michael Grossman, a fourth-year business economics student and president of the UCLA Pre-Law Society. Grossman also said that most of the law schools hosted by the Pre-Law Society have said that the LSAT counts for roughly one-third of the admissions criteria, the same as GPA. “I’m under the impression that it does mean a lot,” Grossman added. “It will either get you over the hump or kill you.” Robert Schaeffer, Public Education Director of Fair Test: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, agreed that while administrators say standardized tests have dropped in importance in admissions, they still send students the message that they better do well on them. “It is certainly true that most departments still post score requirements,” Schaeffer said, “A lot of places are de-emphasizing (them), but both the LSAT and GMAT are required by their accrediting bodies.” Administrators at UCLA, though, said standardized tests are required so that academics still do matter in admission – even if it’s not as much as in the past. “In general it is very significant,” said Michael Rappaport, assistant dean of admissions and special programs in the UCLA School of Law. “I think (law) schools tend to rely more heavily on the LSAT, but we don’t want to overweigh it. We don’t want to minimize grades.” At UCLA, the same goes for graduate programs ranging from engineering to English. In fact, only six out of the College of Letters & Science’s 103 graduate programs don’t require some sort of standardized test. That’s not to say, however, that a standardized test can make or break your chances for admission at UCLA, according to Stephen E. Jacobsen, associate dean of academic and student affairs in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, which requires its applicants to submit GRE scores. “In addition to the statements of purpose and performance in courses directly related to their specific field, the GREs are used in a tertiary way, and are generally used to weed out students whose mathematical and analytic scores are far below the norm,” Jacobsen said. But outside of UCLA, there are a growing number of programs that don’t require standardized tests, and they say the quality of their applicants hasn’t diminished. “To me they are valuable, but I see more and more people not believing in them,” said Chake Kouyoumjian, director of graduate admissions at Loyola Marymount University, whose engineering program has no test requirement. “It shouldn’t be a criterion for judging students.” “You can see that the trend will continue,” she added. “The focus is not to be much on standardized tests.” That “trend” has developed amidst a nationwide debate about the validity of standardized test scores – if they are fair and what skills or knowledge they test. No test has been spared, from the LSAT to the GRE, which Schaeffer said has come under some of the harshest criticism. “A lot of studies predict that the test doesn’t predict much of anything at all,” Schaeffer said referring to the GRE. “It is biased against females, older (out-of-college) students and African Americans and Latinos.” But test directors say that criticism has helped their tests become stronger. According to Ed Haggerty, a media relations specialist with the Law School Admissions Council, which administers the LSAT, the test is constantly rewritten and pre-tested. And in response to criticisms of a cultural bias, test directors are quick to point out the requirements each question must meet before it makes it into a test booklet. “We have several processes to ensure fairness,” said Ellen Julian, director of the MCAT. “We do analyses of potential item bias every time the test is administered.” That effort is something both standardized test proponents and opponents praise, though Schaeffer said that more has to be done to erase bias that test writers may not catch. “There has been a near-total elimination of items that are superficially biased,” Schaeffer said. “But that kind of review doesn’t get at some of the other types of bias inherent in these exams that reward a particular type of style that is word-associated with males and whites.” While some say that graduate-level standardized tests still have a long way to go before they erase any bias, the rewriting process hasn’t made the exams any easier, and students say that is why they take them so seriously. “It was definitely the hardest test I ever took – harder than anything I took at UCLA,” Madhav Boddula, a 1999 UCLA graduate and current medical school applicant, said of the MCAT. “Especially with the anxiety leading up to it and knowing how important it was for my career.” Administrators acknowledge that fact. They also say the tests will continue to be used if only because they are the only equal ground on which to measure candidates who come from a wide range of American and international universities. “You can say that the test is a great equalizer for people who do really well, if they didn’t do well before,” Rappaport said. Ultimately, Parker added, admissions decisions come down to an evaluation of the applicant as a whole – taking GPA, test scores, recommendations and background into consideration. “The person is often the deciding factor because the scores we’re looking at are often very similar,” he said.

TESTING STANDARDS Though studies show that SAT scores have maintained a steady level or gone down in the last decade, scores on some graduate level tests, including the MCAT, have gone up. A look at average MCAT scores of matriculating medical students over the past 8 years: Entering Year Verbal Reasoning Physical Sciences Biological Sciences 1992 9.2 9.2 9.3 1993 9.4 9.3 9.5 1994 9.4 9.4 9.6 1995 9.5 9.7 9.8 1996 9.6 9.8 10.0 1997 9.6 9.8 10.1 1998 9.5 9.9 10.2 1999 9.5 10.0 10.2 SOURCE: American Association of Medical Colleges Original graphic by MAGGIE WOO Web adaptation by ALICE HOM/Daily Bruin

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