LOS ANGELES _ University of California faculty leaders are recommending the continued use of the controversial SAT and ACT as an admission requirement, citing UC data showing the standardized tests may actually help boost enrollment of disadvantaged students, according to a highly anticipated report released Monday.
The preliminary recommendation by the Academic Senate's executive committee comes amid enormous legal and political pressure to drop the tests, which opponents say fail to adequately predict college success and unfairly discriminate on the basis of race, income and parent education levels.
But the new yearlong faculty review found that most UC admissions officers offset that bias by considering an applicant's high school and neighborhood demographics in evaluating the standardized test scores. The review found that less-advantaged applicants were admitted at higher rates for any given test score, a finding that faculty review committee members said surprised them. That process results in increased admission of disadvantaged students, the review found.
The faculty review committee "did not find evidence that UC's use of test scores played a major role in worsening the effects of disparities already present among applicants and did find evidence that UC's admissions process helped to make up for the potential adverse effect of score differences between groups."
UC campuses enroll far more disadvantaged students than do similar elite research universities _ 40% of undergraduates are the first in their families to attend college and 36% are low-income as of fall 2019.
However, the review found that "UC admissions practices do not fully make up for disparities that persist along lines of race and class."
The UC faculty report rejects making standardized tests optional for admission, as more than 1,000 colleges and universities have done. Faculty members _ and some campus admission directors _ are concerned that students with high scores would likely submit them and gain an implicit advantage over those who chose not to take the test or submit their results. They also fear that using high school grades as the primary metric for admission would promote grade inflation, which some research has suggested is more prevalent at affluent schools.
ACT and the College Board, which owns the SAT, have long argued that their tests help predict college performance and offer a uniform yardstick to judge students from diverse schools and states. They reject assertions that their tests are biased, saying that scores merely reflect longstanding inequities in access to quality education.
The Compton Unified School District and other equity advocates, however, have filed lawsuits against the UC system asserting that the standardized testing requirement violates state civil rights laws. The UC Students Assn. and some UC chancellors and regents also have spoken out against the tests.
During deliberations last year, faculty members discussed potentially replacing the SAT and ACT with the state high school assessment known as Smarter Balanced because research showed it predicted college performance as well as the other standardized tests without as much bias against disadvantaged students.
But the review concluded that Smarter Balanced is not universally used throughout the country and would not be feasible for a university system that annually attracts tens of thousands of applicants from private institutions and other states and countries. Faculty also were concerned about the possible impact on Smarter Balanced if turned into a high-stakes test for UC admission.
The report calls for UC to develop its own assessments for admissions _ but notes that process could take nine years.
It also recommends expanding eligibility for guaranteed admission to the UC system from beyond the top 9% of graduating seniors at each local high school. But that measure also is not likely to have an immediate impact, since UC Merced is the only campus with room for eligible students who fail to win admission to their preferred schools. In 2018, only 1.3% of 12,500 who were denied admission at their first-choice schools but offered admission to UC Merced chose to enroll there.
The preliminary recommendations by the executive committee will be reviewed by all Academic Senate members, who are mainly tenured and tenure-track faculty. The Senate is expected to deliver its final report in April to UC President Janet Napolitano, who first requested the review in 2018. Napolitano will then make her recommendation to the UC regents. The regents are expected to vote on the issue in May.
In a statement, the office of the UC president said, "The university aims to continue deliberating the role of standardized testing in our admissions process through a careful, fact-based approach so as to arrive at the most informed decision possible."
