UC Faculty Question Merit Scholarship

The College Board Trustees unanimously voted to extend its five-year contract with the National Merit Scholarship Program last Thursday, dismissing the concerns of a UC faculty committee that is calling the program's use of the PSAT in awarding merit scholarships discriminatory against low-income and minority students.

Although the trustees will continue to discuss the issue, they voted to uphold the use of the test after hearing a report from a committee examining the test, according to a statement.

"The trustees unanimously affirmed the role of the PSAT/NMSQT as one of the College Board's most powerful equity and access tools," Chiara Coletti, spokesperson for the College Board, said in a statement.

The PSAT is used to whittle down the thousands of students vying for a merit scholarship. The top 16,000 test-takers are qualified to receive a scholarship.

But UC's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, which has studied the test for more than five months, said last week that using the test to determine Merit Scholars is not in line with UC's mission. The board unanimously recommended that all eight UC campuses reconsider their affiliation with the program and any admission preferences given to scholarship winners, said BOARS Chair Michael Brown.

The board began investigating the scholarship program last October, when former UC Associate President Patrick Hayashi criticized the College Board for using a program that determines merit based solely on a standardized testing score.

Hayashi, a former College Board trustee, said an uneven proportion of winners are largely or exclusively white and Asian American, a trend he noticed while he was an administrator at UC Berkeley.

"We're not objecting that many, perhaps all, national merit scholarship awardees are excellent students," Brown said. "What we're criticizing is that a single test score makes this determination. We think that it's unsupported by the evidence and highly problematic."

UC has successfully enacted changes in standardized testing, such as when UC President Richard Atkinson threatened to ignore SAT scores in UC admissions unless the board reformatted the test. The new SAT, prompted by Atkinson's protests, made its debut earlier this month.

But this time around, the College Board is standing by the PSAT.

National Merit Scholarship Corporation spokesperson Elaine Detweiler defended the test, saying it is a proper screen for the 16,000 semi-finalists across the nation since it spotlights a representative group of academically talented students.

"By whatever criteria you use for establishing a pool of students, there are going to be some who miss the pool," she said. "That doesn't mean that they are substantially less able than those who just made it in."

She added that the PSAT is only one element used in selecting winners. From the 16,000 semifinalists, the 8,200 winners are chosen based on other criteria, including grades, writing samples, community activities and teacher recommendations, she said.

But Brown said the problem lies in that missing data. The trustees were "less than forthcoming," he said, when UC requested the social demographic data of test-takers and winners.

Detweiler said the board does not keep track of this kind of data.

"It's not that we don't release the data," she said. "It's just that we don't collect it. It's not relevant."

Detweiler also said discrepancies in performance were part of a broader national problem and UC's accusations were a "waste in energy" and a "disservice to the educational system."

"Like all Americans, we are concerned with the disparity in achievement groups in this country," she said. "They should do something to rectify the causes of disparity, not try to cover them over."

But Hayashi said the issue is selecting an academic standard that will do the least harm to disadvantaged students.

"Everybody knows there are inequalities in society," he said. "It's important not to legitimize inequalities on false grounds-that's what this does."

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