College and university leaders say they’re committed to finding legally defensible ways to maintain racial diversity in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in a pair of lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina that ended race-conscious admissions practices. Some institutions have taken one specific action in recent years that’s worthy of widespread replication and will help ensure that talented students of color have access to highly-selective undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs: they eliminated standardized entrance exam requirements.
Eight weeks before the consideration of race as a factor in admissions became unlawful, presidents of highly-selective liberal arts colleges wrote a statement in which they vowed to sustain their institutions’ racial equity efforts, regardless of the then-impending Affirmative Action lawsuits. Immediately after the SCOTUS ruling was released, dozens of colleges and universities posted diversity-affirming statements to their websites and social media accounts. But they didn’t say how they’d achieve and sustain their unspecified racial equity goals. Because new evidence shows that legacy admissions overwhelmingly advantage white applicants, discontinuing those policies and practices is one clear way. Suspending or permanently abandoning use of the SAT, ACT, GMAT, GRE, LSAT, and other entrance exams is another lever institutions have pulled.
The University of California, our nation’s most-selective public higher education system, stopped requiring the SAT and ACT for admission to its nine undergraduate campuses in 2021. The consequences: more highly-qualified students of color are being selected; Berkeley and UCLA are still tied for the #1 spot among public universities in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings; and the UC System maintains its stellar reputation, its desirability and accessibility to white applicants, and its research prowess and funding. In other words, the negative effects of scrapping the standardized testing requirement, if there are any, are neither well documented nor pervasive in the system that received 884,655 applications last undergraduate admissions cycle, a significant increase over prior years.
UCLA Professor Sylvia Hurtado, an Association for the Study of Higher Education past president whose research has been extensively cited in U.S. Supreme Court Affirmative Action cases over the past two decades, says that eliminating the standardized testing requirement helped the UC System get a better sense of public demand for higher education. “All racial and ethnic groups benefited with increases in admissions. Not only were more eligible students identified, campuses also became more selective by using a wide range of criteria to identify talent in holistic review processes.”
Hurtado also notes that over many years students who’ve transferred to UC campuses from community colleges performed well academically and graduated at impressively high rates. UCLA, Berkeley, and the other undergraduate campuses don’t require transfer applicants to submit test scores – the institutions instead place heavy emphasis on those students’ grades in their community college courses, among other factors.
“Research shows that standardized tests are far from objective measures of academic merit, potential, or talent, and are instead better proxies of family wealth and resources,” adds Liliana Garces, a University of Texas at Austin professor who holds appointments in education, law, and the Center for Mexican American Studies. “By discontinuing them, colleges and universities can have a fairer system for admitting qualified and talented students, particularly in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, which severely restricts institutions’ abilities to admit racially and ethnically diverse student bodies and meet their educational missions.”
Generational wealth, parents’ educational attainment levels, zip codes, household income, socioeconomic profiles of K-12 schools attended, and the ability to afford private coaching and high-cost test prep courses are among the most powerful predictors of student performance on exams that institutions use for admission to undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs. They aren’t IQ tests. The SAT and ACT have been shown to be highly correlated with undergraduate students’ freshmen year grade point averages. Yet, there are so many other, far more compelling factors that also reliably determine first-year academic performance, grades in subsequent years, and bachelor’s degree completion rates.
On its website, ETS, makers of the GRE, advocates for holistic reviews of applications and advises against the use of minimum scores. “GRE scores help you compare applicants, but if you use a cut score as a criterion, you could miss an applicant who would be a great asset to your program,” the company warns. Whether operationalized formally through admissions policy (which is rare at this point) or informally (which is far more common), cut scores are mostly used as a convenient way to ‘review’ large quantities of applications. This makes it easier for undergraduate admission officers to conveniently sort thousands of applicants into high, maybe, and no possibility piles.
Similar behaviors occur within faculty review panels of graduate school applicants. University of Southern California Professor Julie Posselt’s book, Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping, is based on observations of admission committees and interviews with faculty members in 10 top-ranked Ph.D. programs. Posselt found that GRE scores and college GPAs, as well as the prestige of the undergraduate institutions applicants attended, were overwhelmingly used to make first cuts in admissions processes.
‘Holistic review’ supposedly means that admissions officers and committees consider everything in candidates’ files. But truthfully, standardized test scores often overpower other factors. Sometimes, files aren’t even read if the test scores are perceivably too low. Too many talented students of color know this and are therefore discouraged from applying to institutions that place too much stock into test scores – it produces a racialized brand of test trauma for some. Removing test scores entirely from the admissions process would not only ensure that all applicants are given equal consideration, but it would also be a responsible way to redress longstanding socioeconomic disadvantages that disproportionately account for below-average scores among applicants of color from lower-income and working class families.
In addition, colleges and universities become less susceptible to legal challenges, specifically accusations of racial preferences, when they remove standardized test scores as a variable in the admissions process. It becomes harder for white applicants to claim that they were discriminated against just because their scores were higher than the average among students of color who were offered admission.
Some institutions have stopped using standardized entrance exams. Others that are interested in maintaining racial and socioeconomic diversity in this post-Affirmative Action era should do the same.
Read the full article here