For generations of California high school students, preparing for, taking and agonizingly waiting for the results of the SATs had been a rite of passage for college applicants.
The Scholastic Aptitude Test was designed to show in ways that a grade point average and extracurriculars can’t how well a student was prepared for a post-secondary curriculum. Sitting in a proctored room with nothing but a No. 2 pencil, showing your abilities with mathematics and language arts, was seen as an objective test of what you had learned and how well you could express that knowledge, under pressure.
The tests were also criticized as biased in favor of students from affluent families who could afford to hire tutors with specific strategies for how to best the test. Poorer students without that advantage were said to be outmaneuvered in the quest to get into a UCLA or a Stanford.
Then, six years ago, in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, all the University of California campuses announced that they would become test-blind, saying that they would not consider standardized testing scores, including the SAT and the similar ACT, during the admissions process for freshmen.
The decision came after a lawsuit alleging that the standardized tests had the effect of excluding non-affluent students from the university.
But now, more than 1,100 faculty members from hard-science departments in the UC system have signed a petition saying standardized test scores should be brought back as soon as the 2027 admission process, at least for prospective STEM majors — science, technology, engineering and math — citing woeful student underpreparedness for their classes.
“We actually view ‘test-blind’ as the true disadvantage,” UC Berkeley mathematics professor Svetlana Jitomirskaya told The Daily Californian student newspaper. “When you remove scores, you pivot to ‘soft’ metrics like expensive extracurriculars and GPA-inflated transcripts from elite private schools. The SAT is the only objective way for a brilliant student from an under-resourced school to ‘break through.’”
The editorial board spoke to Zvezdelina Stankova, another Berkeley math professor, who as a youth escaped Communist Bulgaria because of her prowess in mathematics, going on to take a doctorate in the subject from Harvard.
She said her students “come to UC Berkeley with great hopes and expectations.” But when she recently taught a Calculus II course, a pre-requisite for almost every STEM field that presumes students have previously taken introductory calculus, she said that there were “just way too many who didn’t know the math … probably they had never gotten a bad grade” in their high school careers, but that in an era of grade inflation “these days you can’t believe” in even minimal competence when the average grade-point average for admittees is 4.15. Up to a third of the students weren’t up to passing her class.For what it’s worth, she said that a number of humanities professors have also signed the petition to bring back standardized testing as part of the admissions process.
Notably, a UC San Diego report found an extraordinary 30-fold increase between 2020 and 2025 in incoming first-year students whose math skills were under high school level.
Students expecting to succeed in STEM fields either need to become competent in math in high school or bone up in excellent local community colleges before they tackle the university curriculum.
And the University of California ought to go back to requiring applicants take the SAT.
‘ Este Articulo puede contener información publicada por terceros, algunos detalles de este articulo fueron extraídos de la siguiente fuente: www.dailynews.com ’
