UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ said this week that she is considering dropping the SAT and ACT exams as requirements for admission.
According to a report by the Los Angeles Times, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ announced this week that the university is investigating whether or not they should drop the SAT and ACT exams as requirements for admission.
“They really contribute to the inequities of our system,” Christ said this week during an event hosted by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education.
University of California System Provost Michael Brown agreed with Christ. Brown argued that he would be in favor of replacing the SAT and ACT with something like the “Smarter Balanced” exam, a test which examines California 11th-graders’ proficiency with the Common Core curriculum. Brown said that he would like to design an exam that correlates more closely with standard high school courses taught around the state of California.
UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia K. Larive also announced support for plans to drop the SAT and ACT. “At Santa Cruz, we use holistic admissions to try to evaluate the student within a broader context, which cannot be simply reduced to a number,” Larive said.
John A. Pérez, a Regent of the University of California, is convinced that dropping standardized test requirements is a good idea. Pérez cited data that suggests that the SAT test is a measure of how well students prepare for the test itself, not a measure of how they will do in college.
“The initial information that I’ve seen shows that the highest predictive value of an SAT isn’t in how well a student will do in school, but how well they were able to avail themselves of prep material,” Pérez said. “And access to that prep material is still disproportionately tied to family income. So if you have material available but no pathway to avail yourself of it, that’s not particularly meaningful.”
Breitbart News reported in September that Colorado College will drop the SAT and ACT from its list of admission requirements.
Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.
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