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A modest proposal By Russell Schoch Although UC President Richard Atkinson hoped his speech to the American Council on Education would cause a flurry, he didn’t expect a full-blown media storm. But there were early hints. On Friday, February 16, while he was on his way to Washington, D.C. to give his address, a draft was leaked to the Associated Press, forcing UC officials to distribute the text that evening. When Atkinson opened up the Washington Post and the New York Times on Saturday morning, there he was, on their front pages, with full treatment of his yet-to-be-delivered address. Exercising in the hotel gym that afternoon, Atkinson glanced up at the television screen and saw his speech featured on CNN. What made these early news headlines—and, later, the cover of Time magazine—was Atkinson’s proposal that the University of California no longer include the SAT test as a requirement for students applying to UC’s eight undergraduate campuses. “I knew it would be important in the academic community,” Atkinson said, “but I didn’t think it would be such a big deal on the outside.” But “the outside” includes millions upon millions of former high school students who have agonized over “the test” during the past half century, and now their children and grandchildren, some of whom begin worrying—even prepping—years before high school. That was one of the motivations behind Atkinson’s proposal to eliminate the SAT test as he delivered the 2001 Robert H. Atwell Distinguished Lecture at the 83rd annual meeting of the American Council on Education. “For many years, I have worried about the use of the SAT, but last year my concerns coalesced,” he told the gathering. “I visited an upscale private school and observed a class of 12-year-old students studying verbal analogies in anticipation of the SAT. I learned that they spend hours each month—directly or indirectly—preparing for the SAT, studying long lists of verbal analogies such as ‘untruthful is to mendaciousness’ as ‘circumspect is to caution.’ The time involved was not aimed at developing the students’ reading and writing abilities, but rather their test-taking skills. What I saw was disturbing, and prompted me to spend time taking sample SAT tests and reviewing the literature. I concluded what many others have concluded—that America’s overemphasis on the SAT is compromising our educational system.” Atkinson calls that overemphasis “the educational equivalent of a nuclear arms race.” He wants to end it. His proposal drew swift reaction: high praise from people who agree that the SAT has entirely too much influence over the fate of high school students, in effect determining the course of their lives. And there was loud criticism from two groups: one saying that in abandoning the SAT, Atkinson and UC would be abandoning standards; the other saying that the proposal is a ploy to benefit minority students, who on average do not do as well on the SAT and who, critics charge, have been hurt by the elimination of affirmative action programs. In an interview in his downtown Oakland office, Atkinson emphasized that he is not opposed to standardized testing. His proposal is to eliminate the SAT I, which focuses on verbal and mathematical abilities that are used to help predict first-year college grades; and to continue requiring SAT II, which is designed to measure knowledge in specific subject areas like math and history —until the University can come up with its own standardized test of what a student has learned in high school. The SAT has a long and convoluted history, growing out of early 20th-century American thinking on eugenics and nebulous notions of native intelligence and I.Q. After World War II, the test was promoted by Harvard president James Conant as a more egalitarian way of selecting students for elite, private colleges on the East Coast. But the University of California played a key role in the test’s growing national influence. In 1947, the New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT tests, opened its first branch office—in Berkeley. ETS was seeking a national scope, and the grand prize was UC, the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system.
The Master Plan of 1960 mandated that the top 12.5 percent of the state’s high school graduates would be eligible for UC campuses. But, in a 1965 study, the University found that almost 15 percent of graduating high school seniors were meeting its eligibility requirements. In order to trim that rate, an additional requirement was announced in 1967: All students seeking entry to UC in the fall of 1968 had to take both the SAT I (“reasoning” test) and the SAT II (subject tests). The University of California thus became, and has remained, the SAT’s biggest customer. In the past three decades, there have been increasing criticisms of the test, some focusing on the fact that test scores can be improved by coaching—by taking the Kaplan’s and Princeton Review courses, for example—and therefore cannot be a measure of anything “innate” like aptitude or the ability to reason; others charging that the tests are culturally biased in favor of white students. Berkeley student Shawn Bridgeman, a sociology major with an education minor, agrees with the “coaching” criticism. She is executive director of the People’s Test Preparation Service, which trains Cal students to teach free SAT classes to local high school students. “We find that students who would otherwise be eligible for UC do not get admitted because of their low SAT scores,” she says. “Basically, they don’t know how to take the test. Our program, now in its sixth year, attempts to undo that disadvantage.” A more radical critique was given last year in Disciplined Minds, by UC-educated Jeff Schmidt (he has a B.A. from UCLA and a Ph.D., in physics, from UC Irvine). Schmidt maintains that “The SAT would more properly be called the Scholastic Attitude Test” because it is biased “in favor of those best prepared to serve the status quo.” What the test is called has, in fact, changed over the years. Originally it was the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In 1992, the name was changed to the Scholastic Assessment Test. Four years later, it was proclaimed that SAT is not an acronym for anything: “SAT” means “SAT.” In his February speech, Atkinson commented that “this rhetorical sleight-of-hand served to underscore the mystery of what the SAT is supposed to measure.” In addition to calling for the elimination of the mysterious but highly influential SAT, Atkinson asked that UC campuses move away from using “narrowly defined quantitative formulas” and instead adopt “procedures that look at applicants in a comprehensive, holistic way.” This is pretty much what the Berkeley campus already does, says Calvin C. Moore, chair of Berkeley’s math department. For the past three years, Moore has been in charge of the Academic Senate’s admissions committee, which sets admissions policy for the campus and oversees its implementation. “President Atkinson made two points,” Moore says. “One was eliminating the SAT I test. The second was to urge all the campuses to move toward a more holistic evaluation of prospective students, which is exactly what we’ve done since 1998. We read every student’s file from cover to cover, and evaluate it on the basis of many criteria. We ask what courses the student took, ask if they took advantage of their high school curriculum, ask how good was the high school the student attended, what was the average class size, what was the socio-economic background of the student. We develop a full picture of the school and its academic environment and then ask how well the student performed. A personal essay is also a strong component of our evaluation process.” Moore adds that Berkeley’s admissions process gives no predetermined weight to SAT scores. “In fact, our committee has asked the readers over the past four years to decrease the weight of test scores, relative to other factors; and we’ve asked them to weigh the SAT II scores more than SAT I because we believe the SAT II test is more predictive of freshman grades than is SAT I.” African-American and Latino students on average score significantly lower on the SAT I test—they do better on the SAT II—and a number of conservative voices have called Atkinson’s proposal to eliminate SAT I a way around mid-1990s decisions by UC regents and the state’s voters to ban affirmative action programs. In an op-ed article published in the San Jose Mercury News, Berkeley political science professor Jack Citrin declared: “The proposal to scrap the SATs as part of the admissions process at the University of California has nothing to do with education and everything to do with politics. Its transparent purpose is to circumvent the state constitution’s ban on affirmative action and increase the number of African-American and Latino students at the most selective campuses: UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego.” Atkinson responds: “It’s interesting that Jack does not distinguish between SAT I and II. He’s saying I’m against all standardized tests. I’m not. I’m saying eliminate SAT I, but include a standardized test that measures the materials the student is supposed to acquire in high school.” Ward Connerly, the UC regent who spearheaded the elimination of affirmative action programs by the University, agrees with Citrin. “The test is a barrier to our being able to admit more black and Latino students,” Connerly said from his office in Sacramento. “That’s really what [Atkinson is] saying.” To which the president replies, impatiently: “I can’t control how people read my mind, but I can tell you that I am not saying that.” “Look at Nobel laureates,” he continues, “look at the most creative minds in society, those who have the ability to fully master their opportunities—I would like to see how some of those people scored on the SAT.” Atkinson points out that there has long been a debate about the meaning and the measuring of intelligence. “I don’t want to get into that debate, but I will say that we do not understand what the SAT I test is supposed to measure, and that’s why I want to end up with a test that measures what the students had an opportunity to learn—their core courses in high school—and what the University judges is important for the student to know in order to do well in college.” Although Atkinson’s February speech took the country by storm, he says he has been concerned about the SAT I for many years, even before the regents’ ban on affirmative action. Considered an expert in testing, he was the founding chair of the Board of Testing and Assessment, appointed by the National Academy of Sciences, which was established in 1993 to look into testing. He has publicly expressed his doubts about the SAT I to the UC Board of Regents in each of the past two years. But now he has made a formal proposal to the University-wide Academic Senate to abolish SAT I. The faculty will debate the matter and then make a recommendation to the Board of Regents, which has the final say. The earliest possible year for eliminating the SAT I test at UC is the fall of 2003. Although the test has already been dropped by almost 400 of the nation’s 1,800 four-year colleges and universities as a requirement, Atkinson’s proposal would make the University of California the first public university to do so. Many college presidents—not to mention millions of high school students and their parents—will pay close attention to UC’s decision. And so will the media. “However it turns out,” the New York Times wrote in an editorial, “California’s debate will have served a valuable function if it relieves a growing national obsession with tests and helps the country put the SAT in perspective.” Says President Atkinson: “My hope is that the whole nation, not only the University of California, will begin to rethink this matter, and the nature of college entrance tests will change for the nation as a whole.” Back to Top |
 Illustration by Alison Zawacki
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