Facing pressure from an influential faculty group, the University of California system is considering dropping subject tests of the Scholastic Aptitude Test as a requirement for admission into its nine universities. Currently, applicants are required to take two elective SAT subject tests in addition to the traditional SAT or its counterpart, the ACT.
The Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, a governing body made up of UC faculty and administrators that oversee all matters relating to the admissions of undergraduate students, is calling for revocation of the exams.
BOARS, the committee charged with making recommendations to improve the admissions process, insists that SAT subject tests are discouraging students from diverse and low-income backgrounds from applying to UC schools.
An analysis of 2004 California Basic Educational Data Systems, an annual collection of basic student and staff data from the California Department of education and College Board data estimated that 54 percent of all students eligible for the UC System took the SAT subject test. However, among Black students only 35 percent of those completing every other requirement also took the required SAT subject exams. Among Chicano/Latino students the number was 38 percent.
“In quantitative studies BOARS has repeatedly found that while the predictive power of all standardized admissions tests is quite modest, scores on these elective subject test make a negligible contribution to predictions of initial academic performance in the university,” BOARS representatives said in a formal proposal to the board of regents to reform UC’s freshman eligibility requirements.
University of California institutions are among 71 elite colleges and universities that mandate SAT subject tests. The tests, intended to measure a student’s achievement in a particular subject, have been required by the UC System in some form since the 1970s.
For decades, critics of the SAT and the subject exams have argued that these tests are poor predictors of college performance. In the areas of math and reading, a national test score gap exists between Black and Hispanic students and their White counterparts on the traditional SAT. Researchers also have found that there is a direct correlation between SAT scores and family incomes.
