Click Here to See Larger Image
By Noah Grand
Daily Bruin Reporter
The UC should abandon the SAT and develop a new test that reflects California’s high school curriculum by 2006, according to an Academic Senate committee report released yesterday.
Instead, the committee report proposes students take tests in math and English and two additional subject tests that are more representative of California’s high school curriculum.
The College Board – creators of the SAT – and ACT Inc. will both help the UC develop this new test, said Dorothy Perry, chair of the Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools that released the report.
“We are trying to set up a California exam that covers curriculum matter that we are very concerned should be covered,” Perry said.
While BOARS has discussed the use of the SAT in admissions since the mid-1990s, a strong move to eliminate it was sparked in February when UC President Richard Atkinson proposed making the SAT I optional in UC admissions.
Currently, UC applicants must take math and verbal SAT I tests or the ACT, and three SAT II subject tests, including a writing and a math section.
One advantage of the proposal, according to UC Regent Velma Montoya, is that it will reduce the amount of tests students have to take.
“I was being concerned that students were being overly tested,” Montoya said.
Any new test should be “fair” to all demographic groups, Perry said.
A UC Office of the President study on the SAT in October revealed that white and Asian American students applying to the UC tend to score higher than Latinos, blacks and Native Americans.
However, the report does not specify how the new test would eliminate these ethnic differences.
Other studies presented in a November conference on the SAT at UC Santa Barbara showed that students from wealthy families average higher SAT scores than their less wealthy counterparts, who generally go to schools with fewer resources.
“The members of BOARS are well aware that they cannot eliminate this level of ‘disparate impact’ admissions tests have on students from socioeconomically disadvantaged circumstances,” the report states.
The UCOP study also showed that the SAT II is a better predictor of how a student will do at the UC than the SAT I, which was founded on generalized intelligence tests.
Scores from any new test must be translatable into an equivalent SAT or ACT score so students applying to both the UC and out of state schools would not need to take multiple sets of tests, Perry said.
Perry said there would be a provision for out-of-state students, who could take another “acceptable” test.