The SAT Warps Debate About Admission

The Daily Californian just reported on the recent controversy ("Article Criticizes UC Berkeley Admissions," Oct. 7) spawned by two recent Los Angeles Times articles on UC Berkeley admissions ("UC Berkeley Admissions Scrutinized," Oct. 4 and "UC Probes Entry Policy," Oct. 7).

Unfortunately, the Times pieces give a highly misleading picture of admissions at California's flagship public university. The articles are based on a confidential UC Regent report drafted by Regent and San Diego Padres owner John Moores. Is it merely a coincidence that on the weekend before the election, Moores, the largest financial backer of Ward Connerly's now-defeated Proposition 54 (San Diego Union-Tribune, "Moores' view on Prop. 54 irks Latinos," Sept. 29) would spoon-feed this confidential report to reporters so that Connerly could imply the need for Prop. 54 by brazenly claiming that Berkeley was violating Prop. 209? The Los Angeles Times education writers blew it by remaining oblivious to this political context.

More importantly, the Times article and the confidential report give the false impression that students with high SAT scores somehow deserve to be admitted to Berkeley while the 400 students with SATs under 1000 points do not.

As two Berkeley alumni who were admitted despite less than sparkling standardized test scores, and then went on to successfully publish many law review articles and a book on higher education admissions, we know from personal experience how important it is that opportunities to receive an education at the University of California be based on real merit, and not simply a numbers game based on the SAT.

Outgoing UC President Richard Atkinson, himself a psychologist and an expert on standardized tests, stated in a widely reported speech to the American Council on Education that "Americans overemphasis on the SAT is compromising our educational system."

A 2001 UC Office of the President study of freshmen at Berkeley and six other UC campuses found that the SAT only explained 13 percent of the variance in freshmen grades, and that even this modest correlation was spuriously elevated by socioeconomic factors.

An earlier paper from Gregg Thomson, UC Berkeley's Director of the Office of Student Research found that there was "zero correlation" between SAT scores and graduation rates for African Americans at Berkeley. The same report found that after separating out recruited athletes, Berkeley students with SAT scores in the 800s had six-year graduation rates of 75 percent, and those with scores in the 900s graduated 79 percent. This is nearly the same as the 82 percent graduation rate among Berkeley students with SATs in the 1500s, who on average are from far more affluent backgrounds.

In The Shape of the River, a mammoth study of elite universities, William Bowen and Derek Bok, former presidents of Princeton and Harvard respectively, found the SAT bore little relationship to graduation rates after controlling for socioeconomic status and other factors. Students with SATs under 1000 graduated 83 percent of the time, while those with SATs above 1300 graduated 87 percent of the time.

In short, these studies confirm Stanford psychologist Claude Steele's expert report in the landmark University of Michigan affirmative action cases, where he explained that a gap of several hundred points on the SAT scores "can sound big, but actually represents a very small difference in skills critical to grade performance."

Accordingly, the confidential Moores report does not, as the Times article suggests, provide "a highly unusual window into the student admissions process at UC Berkeley." Rather, this report is more like a carnival mirror used by Moores, Connerly and others to exaggerate the significance of SAT score differences in order to score cheap points in the debate over post-209 admissions.

Like Prop. 54, Ward Connerly's suggestion that these SAT score differences indicate a Prop. 209 violation is bad medicine for California. There is a well-established connection between family income and performance on the SAT. Students from families with income of $10,000 to $20,000 average 898 points on the test, those with income of $40,000 to $50,000 average 1004 on the SAT, and those with $100,000-plus income average 1126 on the SAT. California taxpayers deserve a flagship university that is not simply a subsidized playground for the sons and daughters of the privileged. Such a policy not only would deprive access but would degrade the quality of education as well.

Scores on the SAT also have a more substantial correlation with racial and ethnic background than other criteria. Given this fact and the meager predictive value of the test, over-relying on the SAT amounts to racial profiling in favor of white applicants, arguably a Prop. 209 preference.

Recall that in the 1980s, SAT verbal cut-offs were also misused at Berkeley to unfairly exclude Asian Americans. Thus, the vision of fairness underlying the mean-spirited Moores report is contrary to the Supreme Court's recent affirmative action ruling in Grutter, where the Court declared, "Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our Nation is essential if the dream of one Nation, indivisible, is to be realized."

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