University of California President Richard C. Atkinson's loud call in February for abolishing the use of the SAT I test in undergraduate admissions is likely to have a lot more significance outside the UC system than within.
Atkinson's university has already spent the last four years quietly butsystematically de-emphasizing the test (originally called the Scholastic AptitudeTest) in determining admissions eligibility, first by moving to admit allapplicants whose grades put them in the top 4 percent of their high schoolclasses, and more recently by placing increased emphasis on the three SAT IItests--the subject matter exams (formerly called the achievement tests) in suchfields as composition, math, American history, and biology--that most UCapplicants are required to take. The SAT II is now weighted three times moreheavily than the SAT I in UC admissions considerations.
For a test that has longbeen regarded as the gold standard in selective-college admissions (despite allthe caveats about overemphasizing its importance), the broader significance ofAtkinson's plan could be enormous. Some small colleges--Bates, Bowdoin, and Mount Holyoke, among others--have already stopped requiring the SAT. Criticism of its use elsewhere has been mounting over the last few years as race preferences, which were used to mitigate the test's impact on minority admissions, have been prohibited in California, Washington, and Texas. In Texas the federal appellate court decision banning affirmative action prompted the legislature, with Governor George W. Bush's concurrence, to adopt a policy of admitting any student in the top 10 percent of his or her high school class to the state's selective universities. In Florida the threat of an antiaffirmative action initiative brought a preemptive strike by Governor Jeb Bush, who replaced race preferences with a policy of admitting the top 20 percent of each high school class to the state's public universities. As affirmative action is systematically eradicated, standardized testing comes under siege. In fact in this context, William Bowen and Derek Bok's 1998 book TheShape of the River, which argued in favor of race preferences in college admissions, seems as much a defense of the SAT as it does of affirmative action.
It was largely UC's adoption of the SAT as an admissions requirement back in the1960s that made the SAT a national test and gave the exam--now taken by some 1.2million college applicants annually--a legitimacy not limited to selectiveprivate institutions in the East. But Atkinson, a cognitive psychologist, thinksthe SAT test-prep hysteria "is compromising our educational system," and he hasbeen itching to dump the test for years. If UC, which is far and away the largestcustomer for the test, eliminates the SAT requirement (a decision that must stillbe approved by the faculty and the regents), it will send a loud message to a lotof other places. Even Atkinson's announcement, leaked to the media before hecould formally make it, has generated an unprecedented reaction. As soon as hedelivered the comments, on February 18, the College Board, which runs the SATprogram, fired back. The test, said College Board President Gaston Caperton, is apowerful tool. "To eliminate [it] ... is not fair to anyone."
But what may beeven more important than Atkinson's SAT challenge was his call for a more"holistic," Ivy Leaguemodel method of choosing freshmen: judging each candidateon the basis of his or her total record--grades, test scores, athletic orartistic talent, handicaps overcome, social background, community service, andthe things he or she can contribute to the college and, ultimately, to society.For those with long enough memories, that may sound a little too much like the"whole man" standard by which elite colleges chose preppies and otherwell-connected Wasps and excluded urban ethnics--Jews, particularly--in thedecades preceding (and, in many cases, immediately after) World War II. The SAT,as its early boosters saw it, was a national measure not tied to particularschool curricula and thus a much fairer way to assess applicants, including thosescruffy city kids, who did not attend fancy schools. It also seemed to provide anobjective measure that mitigated the white-shoe preferences of the old-schooladmission officers.
But like a lot of today's critics, Atkinson sees the SAT exactly the other wayaround, as something that gives unfair advantage to students from privilegedhomes who can afford Kaplan or PrincetonReview tutoring programs, and as the cause of an academically distorting, quasi-corrupt test-prep frenzy that for some kids begins at the age of 12. Atkinson doesn't want to drop tests; the SAT II's, he believes, tend to be better predictors of college achievement. And in his view, they reward the student's high school effort--not something akin to native "intelligence." (In addition, among UC applicants, the ethnic gap on the SAT II tests is considerably smaller than it is on the SAT I). But the change of perspective over two generations--the call for a more holistic approach--is also an ironic imputation of confidence in the higher-education establishment. Trust us, Atkinson and the establishment seem to be saying, to make the right decisions.
For selective public universities,however, and for a lot of private institutions as well, holistic decisions aren'tall that easy. It takes great resources to read all those admissions folders andfairly evaluate all the intangible stuff they contain--recommendations, essays,personal background, professions of achievement in music or devotion to theneedy. And in public institutions particularly, it makes it difficult to justifythe decisions: to say that an admissions staff, in its holistic judgment, sawmore promise in candidate A than in candidate B, especially if they're fromdifferent ethnic backgrounds, is likely to invite all sorts of questions andpressures. If an institution has "objective" numbers, decisions are much easierto defend. More important, for colleges not too sure of their own reputation, theaverage SAT score of entering classes, like the "Ph.D." after professors' names,remains an indispensable marketing tool--a symbol of academic respectability.
Atkinson's proposal is quite obviously an assertion of supreme confidence in UC'sreputation. But if the private rumbles from some of UC's chancellors are anyindication, that confidence may not be shared at some of the university's lessprestigious campuses. The SAT, in fact, may be far more important forinstitutions that can't afford to be as choosy as Berkeley or UCLA--or, for thatmatter, Harvard or Amherst. Berkeley may be secure enough to abandon the SATwithout fear that it will be thought to be watering down standards, but manyother colleges, like, say, UC Riverside or UC Santa Cruz, may not be. And at atime when many states (wrongly) use SAT scores as an indicator of school quality,getting rid of the thing will be even harder.
Either way, however, Atkinson hasdone more to fuel the controversy over what Nicholas Lemann called "The Big Test"than anything that's occurred in years--and, in the long run, probably more tofoster the searching look that the test deserves. The fact that Atkinson'sproposal comes just as politicians (and many business people) are pushing forstill more high-stakes testing in our schools and colleges makes it even moretelling. "No one," he told me, "has been an honest broker on testing." With hischallenge, the biggest critic is not the liberals at FairTest, but a very visible figure within the temple.