A Test Under Pressure

Last Friday, protesters from advocacy group By Any Means Necessary rallied once again on the steps of Sproul Hall to demand changes to UC admissions policy.

BAMN argues, and independent research increasingly suggests, that the SATs are not an accurate predictor of a student's performance once admitted to a UC campus. If that's the case, then we agree that the tests should be changed-not necessarily because they're biased, but because what they tell the admissions committee apparently isn't relevant.

What got lost in the protest were important logical distinctions that don't translate well to poster board: Whether the SATs are a useful measure of anything at all is not the same as the question of whether the tests are inherently biased. That debate in turn differs from whether that bias results from the nature of the SAT specifically or of testing in general.

There is ample evidence to suggest that some of the disparity in SAT scores is the product of a cultural slant in how the tests are written. There are also promising signs in the restructuring of the SAT and growing popularity of the ACT that this might be fixable, that it's possible to write an exam more likely to gauge aptitude, as advertised, than whether you grew up using the same vocabulary as the people who wrote the questions.

BAMN's protest on Friday, however, devoted less attention to the more insidious aspect of bias in education: gross inequalities in the California K-12 system.

Here, in fact, is the rawest socioeconomic bias in education, that an underfunded school in Barrio Logan simply can't afford to prepare its students for the UC admissions process as well as a school in La Jolla. Here is where you confront the least palatable reality that even the most evenhanded exam imaginable will still come easier to the student with the resources to prepare for it than it will to the student without.

BAMN seemed to know as well as we do that our "unrepresentative" campus demographics are the result of factors at play long before a would-be college student starts to fill out an application. But rather than suggest measures that aim for the root of the problem they perceive, they have found an easier target: the UC admissions process. Their anger is thus misdirected.

While the university should of course continue to strive for the perfect measure of merit, there is no conceivable admissions process that can perfectly control for whether your high school counselors were incompetent, you were ill the day you sat for the SAT, or you had to work nights in your critical junior year.

Nor can admissions abandon the effort to standardize, problematic as it may be. Beyond the sheer impossibility of evaluating more than 100,000 applications a year without such aids is the danger inherent in greater subjectivity: We must remember it was not so long ago that admission committees' "discretion" kept qualified minorities out of public institutions, not in.

BAMN's vision-a public university that perfectly reflects the state of California-is therefore not attainable through simple manipulation of the measures used to evaluate UC candidates and not a question of making progressively greater and greater allowances to achieve the desired result.

The greater problem is not with tough standards, but with an educational system that is failing to prepare students to meet them. And whatever we might hope, that's not a problem solvable in Sproul Hall.

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