The University of California is suspending the SAT as a requirement for admission until at least 2024.
This is a major blow to the College Board, which owns and administers the SAT.
In a major decision that could lead to a shake-up of the nation’s standardized testing landscape, University of California President Janet Napolitano is recommending the suspension of the SAT and ACT tests as an admissions requirement until 2024 and possible elimination after that — a move that could widen access to a UC education for disadvantaged students.
In a proposal posted Monday, Napolitano is recommending a complex and unusual five-year plan that would make the tests optional for two years and eliminate testing requirements in year three and four. Then, in year five, UC would move toward a standardized assessment developed specifically for the 10-campus system.
The plan would produce rich data on which students get admitted under each strategy and how they perform in college. But it could be challenging for campuses to implement and raises concerns about different entry standards for different classes.
The recommendation is not completely in line with the Academic Senate, which recently voted unanimously to keep the tests for five years while alternatives are researched. But Senate Chair Kum-Kum Bhavnani expressed appreciation that Napolitano adopted many key recommendations in a faculty task force report on testing, including development of a new assessment for UC.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
David Coleman isn’t generating the same revenue, oh no!! Don’t know it this spells the beginning of a greater trend, but I hope so. My school requires the SAT as a graduation requirement, though this is misuse of the test and we have told them so. Connecticut has made taking the SAT a requirement and, besides the multiple days wasted grilling the kids on test taking skills (“SAT Boot Camp – doesn’t that sound great?), a complete day is dedicated to just taking the SAT. Sophomores must take the PSAT on the same day. Using Kahn Academy is mandatory and we are to monitor students’ use of their service as in-school and at-home requirements. I can not wait to retire.
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MD was going to use it as a grad requirement but kept PARCC instead. Everyone takes the PSAT starting in 9th grade and AP for all is pushed on our students. It’s such a racket! I hope the College Board crumbles like the house of cards that it is. WOOHOO!!!
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racket is right: it is amazing how much suddenly ‘essential’ training and materials were forced onto our school — new stuff every year — once the district demanded that all students take the PSAT and SATs
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So true…
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A minor point, but you misspelled Con Academy.😀
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LMAO
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David Coleman must be pulling out what few hairs he has left in his head. What the pandemic didn’t destroy the U of C will.
This is the End
The end is nigh
For Coleman guy
The jig is up
For Coleman sup
The revenue
Has turned to glue
As downward bend
Becomes a trend
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The SAT has always been a scam. The test was created by a group headed by eugenicist and white supremacist Carl Brigham and intended to keep “inferior” persons from higher education. It used to be called the Scholastic Aptitude Test because it was supposed to predict success in college (that is, aptitude for doing college work). The trouble is that it didn’t, not beyond the first semester. High-school grades were stronger and longer-term predictors of college success. Eventually, the CB dropped that misleading name (but not the implicit claim–why else would colleges insist on applicants taking it?). Over the decades, as more students applied to college and the number taking the tests increased, scores declined precipitously. When Coleman took over, he subjected the test to a major revision to align it with the puerile Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] bullet list that he had hacked together and that Gates had paid for so he could have a single national bullet list to key depersonalized educational software and Orwellian educational databases to. I suggested, at the time, that Lord Coleman, appointed by Gates the decider for the rest of us, name his new test the Scholastic Common Core Abusive Test, or SCCAT, because Common Coring had made the questions (as it did much of U.S. ELA curricula), vague, tricky, tortured, tortuous, and often, arguably, not actually answerable. Coleman is the cancer on U.S. education that keeps on giving.
The College Board “non-profit” has been bilking the public with numerology for far, far too long in order to pay fat compensation to its executives. Glad to see this move, however, slight, toward sanity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Brigham
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This is great news, great meaning good and great meaning big. The SAT has been, since its inception, a threat to equality, diversity, student data privacy, and the very quality of education itself. Life isn’t multiple choice. Maybe my school district will stop throwing money and students’ private personal information to College Board. Three jeers for David Coleman! Hip! Hip! Chimera!…
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(My district mandated all students take the PSAT in grades 8 and 9 last year.)
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Oh. But as Hamlet knew, life is multiple choice:
To B or not to B
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That is the question. To C or not to C, that is another question.
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And for Canadians:
To A or not to A
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And for pirates
To R or not to R
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For everyone except babies
To P or not to P.
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Some Pirates love the C. So they naturally do better on multiple choice tests
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True enough
It’s also worth noting that if Hamlet had eliminated just one possibility ( B ) , he could have solved all his problems.
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Maybe Kaplan test taking strategies might have helped him with that.
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Great chuckles this a.m., SDP! Thanks! 😀 😀
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They know the SAT is worthless. What if students handed them a portfolio of their school years work?
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Now that’s something worth considering.
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Agreed. Much better idea.
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Then the admissions people would actually have to do some work.
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In addition to watching fake sailing videos from applicants gaming the system, which is work, of course.
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Man, they really threw the book at this fellow
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/College-admissions-scandal-Ex-Stanford-sailing-13973436.php
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“..they really threw the book at this fellow…” Ha!
On the other hand, I thought the entire Varsity Blues scandal was a publicity stunt that avoided confronting the real corruption in college admission by stoking faux outrage at minor issues.
A father of 2 fencers at Harvard — 2 recruits — purchased the home of the fencing coach for $400,000 more than its value and then sold it at a big loss. Not a problem.
Jared Kushner’s dad makes a big donation to Harvard and his kid gets in — not a problem.
It reminds me of the NCAA throwing the book at Ohio State football players who traded their Rose Bowl shirt for free tattoos! But somehow “overlooking” that Duke University’s star recruit Zion Williamson’s family somehow was able to move into a mansion in Durham, NC, where Duke is located, for the year he played for Duke.
I have no sympathy for the parents who paid money to have someone else take their kid’s ACT or change the answers on their kid’s ACT. That is outright cheating and everyone knows it is wrong.
I do have sympathy for people like Lori Loughlin who assumed it was perfectly legal to make large donations to get their kid into college and exaggerate their accomplishments because so many people seem to make donations and exaggerate their accomplishments (“started their own charity!”) to get their kids into college!
Apparently there is a proper way to buy your kid a seat at college and an improper way, just like there is a proper way to buy a top basketball or football player to attend your college and an improper way. And the proper way costs a lot more money so it only available to the super rich who don’t want any mere millionaires to be able to purchase the seats they believe should be reserved for their children.
Apparently buying the fencing coach’s home for a lot more than it is worth is proper, but making a big donation to an athletic department fund is not (unless it is done the “right” way, which only those with the most privilege are allowed to know).
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Off topic Diane – I’m sorry but I don’t know another way of getting in contact with you. Eric “Chaz” Chasanoff, author of Chaz’s School Daze died of COVID today.
I humbly request he be added to the blog’s roll of honor and a post be written commemorating his contributions. He was a tireless warrior
Here is the UFT posting about his passing. He will be missed.
https://ufthonors.uft.org/chasanoff/?fbclid=IwAR0BNp9MLg2AbxCwA6mzqhPh0FOBk2XiuDb8HqXOeaUxOwTTqcc_QvtlJYw
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I hope people will consider this other perspective:
Some students, some males in particular, don’t care about homework. Their grades are very low, oftentimes failing. And yet they do well on tests, such as the SAT or ACT. This is their ONLY chance to get into college.
Why do I know this? Because I’ve seen it with some of my students and because this is how my children got into college: They had low GPAs yet high ACT scores. Please trust me when I say that my spouse and I tried many, many things to encourage our children to complete their homework during high school. But it was like pushing large rocks up a hill.
Thank God that colleges accepted SAT and ACT scores because our children are now in college and doing very well. They have finally realized the value of completing and turning in assignments. Their earlier poor performance might be a developmental thing. It might be a gender thing. It might be a video game addiction thing. Who knows. I’ve tried to figure it out for years and even hired psychologists and counselors. But the test scores allowed them to prove they had the intellect to be accepted at college.
Not everyone can get good GPAs, for a variety of reasons, including mental and physical (health) challenges, and test scores offer one other way to reveal a student’s potential.
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I have noticed this phenomenon as well. It tends to reward the behaviors you describe above. I have thought about this quite a bit. Is it good to reward those who are naturally bright but are lazy and will not do work? Is it a redemptive function of the test that it gives people a chance to learn even though they are not getting off to a good start? Are the people who react to education this way ultimately to become good citizens or are they always going to be the type of people who only do what they are rewarded for? Is this the fault of giving grades in school? Such young people usually do only what is required of them, and grades often set a low bar for a smart kid. Should we not expect more from those who can perform?
Thanks for your post. It raises a lot of questions.
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One question it raises is “why bother with k-12 school at all if one can just take a brief test that supposedly demonstrates readiness for college?”
Aren’t hard work, focus and “taking school seriously” important factors when considering whether someone is ready for college? — (and more deserving of the opportunity than someone else with whom they are competing for a spot)
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RT says:
“Is it good to reward those who are naturally bright but are lazy and will not do work?”
Students with high standardized test scores and low GPAs are unlikely to be “lazy” kids who “don’t do work”. They don’t have a secret genius in taking standardized tests that hard working students who are not “lazy” lack.
A better question is what to do with the students who are doing the work to learn the material but who have not yet acquired the executive function skills (which sometimes doesn’t happen until late teens or early twenties, especially for boys) that turns working to learn the subject matter into high GPAs.
Public schools place an extremely high value on executive function skills. A student with excellent executive function skills can work significantly LESS hard and get much higher grades than a student with terrible executive function skills.
The students who get high ACT or SAT scores and have low GPAs may spend more time learning the subject than students with much higher GPAs. But they often neglect to do the things that seem easy to the rest of us (i.e. turning that homework in or making sure it looks neat and legible) that are incredibly difficult for them to do.
Those skills can kick in at college. It’s not simply that those kids aren’t lazy anymore. It is that they now have developed the executive function skills so that they can actually spend less time on homework and get much higher grades.
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RT,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions. I, too, have wondered about those same things. I see this each year with several students. Also, two out of our two children got poor grades in high school. And I am a total overachiever, so I was stunned. Did we fail as parents? We never bought video game consoles, but they found games online.
Part might be laziness. But there is some other mystery part that I can’t figure out. It might be that they don’t buy into the system (which I kind of admire–they’re not followers). It might be that boys aren’t as developmentally ready for homework as girls. Or as compliant. And there is an executive functioning component that is missing. Plus, a lot of young people (again, especially boys I have noticed) that just plain want to be active and not spend time doing homework.
It’s not completely attributable to laziness. They speak of not feeling motivated. In fact, our sons did well in the gifted and talented classes, but when placed in regular classes their bloom faded. It was a sad and concerning sight. Are “regular” classes enticing enough? But it’s not the teachers’ fault, either.
So, our sons’ ACT scores helped to save them both. Both are doing well now in college and lead responsible lives and are headed toward productive careers. If college admission had been determined only by GPAs, we’d have been stuck.
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Children (especially tween/teen boys) have a problem when they are forced to do unnecessary tasks. They actually take offense to it. I don’t think children should have homework until middle school…and then it should be minimal and meaningful. High school homework should be meaningful but also minimal. Kids know that most of the work being sent home is nothing but busy work. Do you, as a teacher, like bringing your work home with you? School time should be school time and home time should be home time….school is NOT a career. The test scores of standardized tests mean nothing except that the kids know how to select the best answer that the test manufacturer thought would be the correct answer. The way to “game” the test is to drop 2 choices automatically and from the remaining 2 you need to “infer” by the wording of the question what “may” be the correct answer. Your kids were smart enough to game the test and they were smart enough to know that they were being asked to do busy work and they are smart enough to do well in college because they know their hard work matters. Tests be damned….they need to go far away!
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There is some research backing this point of view that grades are not gender neutral. See https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info-Brief-2014-12.pdf
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RT, “those who are naturally bright but are lazy and will not do work”
No doubt some of those high SAT/ low GPA’s must fit that description. I don’t work w/ highschoolers so can’t generalize. I remember kids from my own hisch exp (mostly boys) who were a “quick study,” did little work but aced tests. It didn’t earn them high GPA’s, nor were they in “accelerated” [trackg days]. That “gift” was considered the kiss of death by peers, as more flunked out of college than learned how to study [unless you transferred before the boom fell, you got drafted].
My own kids were more or less the reverse, i.e., poor test-takers. [They were musicians, & landed on their feet in specialized colleges: apparently few musicians get good grades so that gave them a leg up 😉 ]. Some of their peers with the “test gift” were not lazy per se. They coasted by w/assnts they could have done better, pouring efforts into what they loved: sports, the hisch newspaper, oddball stuff e.g.civil war re-enactments via miniature soldiers/ battlefields. One I knew better than others found just the right unique brainy but personalized college, then was assailed w/bipolar disorder onset. He– betwixt & between learning to manage the disease, living at home– built a successful biz ground-up, coaching others in SAT et al test prep!
The excursion into anecdotal detail to point out, this is not binary. All students w/low “work”- high test grades are not lost causes, nor do we need to worry we’re indulging poor work habits by giving them an out. They are just square pegs on round holes, similar to LD kids. All stdzd tests are not bad per se: haven’t we always agreed they were OK in certain contexts if not overdone? I fully agree w/Montana teacher that there needs to be some form of stdzd test, be it SAT or baccalaureate [Euro style] to make us aware of those students who might succeed in college tho they don’t fit the stereotype.
That said, no question such kids challenge teachers to find ways to motivate them to acquire study habits before college, or they may likely fail there.
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Thank you so much, all of you, for adding to this conversation. It has been on my mind and in my heart for many years. We certainly wanted our sons to learn good study habits in high school; we just couldn’t figure out how to make that happen. We tried a lot of things. Anyway, the whole experience did make me a more compassionate teacher!
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Good riddance. It was my good fortune to attend a college that didn’t require this cash cow for the College Board.
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Example of progressive shock doctrine?
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