The University of California Academic Assembly, a group which represents UC faculty, has recommended that the UC Board of Regents change current admissions policies at its nine undergraduate UC campuses. The faculty proposal will be considered by the regents in July.

Currently, undergraduate applicants to any of the University of California's undergraduate campuses are required to submit either a standardized ACT or SAT Reasoning Test result, and two SAT subject tests. The Academic Assembly has proposed ending the requirement that students take the subject tests.

The vast majority of UC applicants take the SAT Reasoning Test rather than the ACT, which is a test favored in the Midwest.

The SAT subject tests differ from the SAT Reasoning Test in that the subject tests are designed to measure specific knowledge in one of five academic areas-English, history, math, science and foreign language. The subject tests are achievement tests of material students should learn in school whereas the SAT Reasoning Test covers only two subject areas, English (including writing) and math. Only the math portion of the exam will test material students will have been expected to have studied in high school.

The SAT Reasoning Test is intended to generally measure "critical thinking skills you'll need for academic success in college," according to test purveyors, the College Board. The SAT Reasoning Test is really, therefore, an aptitude or intelligence test, designed to predict how well students will do once they get to college.

The SAT Reasoning Test measures neither a student's mastery of high school subject content nor does it do a very good job of predicting a student's future college performance. In fact, though high school grades are highly subjective products of widely discrepant school systems and teachers, a student's high school grades better predict her subsequent academic performance in college than does her SAT Reasoning Test score, according to research from the College Board.

On its face, the faculty proposal is a common sense suggestion to ease roadblocks for underrepresented minority applicants who, while otherwise eligible to apply to UC schools, fail to meet the subject test requirement. Dr. Ana-Christina Ramon, research coordinator for the University of California, Los Angeles Ralph J. Bunche Center is quoted in the magazine Diverse Issues in Higher Education about the recommendation. Ramon said: "Research has found that minority students are less likely to take the SAT subject tests. It's an additional test and many minority students don't always have the opportunity to take the test or even recognize that it's necessary."

The problem is that the subject tests are often the best yardstick that admissions' evaluators have to predict how students will fare once they get to college. Rather than eliminate subject tests, UC should work with high schools to make sure that qualified students understand the need, and have the chance, to take those tests.

Michael Brown, Chair of the UC Systemwide Academic Senate, defended the faculty proposal, telling the Los Angeles Times that most faculty were convinced that the subject test requirement was "cutting people out of at least a shot of consideration for no reasons that have to do with achievement." Brown suggested that the current subject tests limit the UC's ability to bring in as diverse a class as possible.

But at the least selective UC campuses, the fear is that the faculty proposal will open the door to a lower-caliber of student. In a letter to Brown expressing why UC Riverside could not support the faculty recommendation, Thomas Cogswell, Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate, wrote that without a clear and compelling reason to change the current admission's policy, UC Riverside faculty opposed replacing a bright line with a broad grey zone that would cause admissions staff at Riverside to dip lower into the applicant pool.

Responding to the proposed UC policy change, Dean of Admissions at Harvard University William Fitzsimmons told a reporter from the Harvard Crimson that his university's internal studies have proven the efficacy of subject test scores to predict academic success at Harvard. Fitzsimmons said the subject tests "have been better predictors than either high school grades or the SAT (Reasoning Test)."

When UC policy makers evaluated the university's standardized test requirements several years ago, they found that subject tests were the best single predictor of freshman grades (better than high school grade point average or the SAT Reasoning Test) based upon UC data compiled over a four-year period. Subsequent UC research has concluded that the subject tests are better predictors of overall academic performance in college than the SAT Reasoning Test.

The faculty recommendation is especially perplexing in that the committee previously urged the university to place twice as much weight on the subject tests as upon the SAT Reasoning Test and, before the College Board made minor changes to that test, suggested the university eliminate consideration of the SAT Reasoning Test altogether.

A UC commissioned report issued five years ago concluded that the subject tests offered the university a number of advantages over the SAT Reasoning Test. The report urged "that the University seeks to measure mastery of the content of the high school curriculum, that using scores from appropriate admissions tests to complement high school grades increases our ability to achieve this goal, and that achievement exams are more suited to measuring mastery of the high school curriculum than exams designed to measure general intellectual aptitude. Moreover, achievement tests provide information that students and their families can use to prepare for college and that schools can use to evaluate and improve their own programs."

Six of the nine University of California schools are ranked within the top fifty colleges in the 2008 US News & World Report list of top national universities. It is the nation's most competitive universities generally that require the SAT subject tests. By dropping the SAT subject tests requirement, several UC campuses may lose footholds within the top tier.

The University of California seeks a laudable goal of insuring that the state's colleges will be available to a wide spectrum of students. Given that colleges have just completed the most competitive admission's cycle in our country's history, with no letup foreseen for at least the next several years, it is no small task to provide access to many capable students. Surely, though, the answer is not to throw away a merit-based opportunity for students to demonstrate competency. As California legislator Van Tran wrote recently in a Los Angeles Times op-ed critical of the faculty proposal: "Let's not take away a tool so many minority and immigrant students need to achieve their dream of a college education."

Tags: SAT SUBJECT TEST, UC ACADEMIC ASSEMBLY, ADMISSION