The Role of Standardized Tests in College Admissions

This impulse [to eliminate testing to allow more Black and Latino students a chance at admission] is based on an assumption that because Black, Latino, Pacific Islander, American Indian and Alaska Native kids, on average, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, don’t perform as well on these tests as their white and Asian peers, the tests must be, in some way, racially biased. But what, really, does that mean? Is it that the tests ask racially biased questions? Which ones? Is it that it is somehow unfair to give a Black or Latino student a test of abstract cognitive skill and that Black and Latino students should be tested differently? This would seem dangerously close to saying that they aren’t as intelligent as others. If that isn’t the intention, then is the inference that there is something cultural, broadly speaking, that hinders their ability to perform well on these tests? If so, what?...

I would prefer that we address the value of the tests second, after first showing that these minority students — including those middle-class and affluent kids who don’t lack resources — can take standardized tests and do just as well, in the aggregate, as white and Asian American students. To me, as a Black American (and, I assume, to many Latino or Hispanic Americans as well) this is Black, or brown, pride.

Instead of reflecting on what amounts to decreased opportunities for all students in the state to attend U.C.L.A. [the school’s admission rate dropped ~4% from 2020 to 2021], the school declared victory. “I’m over the moon,” a U.C.L.A. official told The Los Angeles Times, referring to the increase in minority students. “The years of hard work … bore fruit for us, and it’s a good feeling.”

But Black enrollment at U.C.L.A. went from 6 percent in 2020 to just 7 percent in 2021. Latino enrollment went from 23 percent to 26 percent. Asian American enrollment, for what it’s worth, fell from 42 percent to 39 percent. At Berkeley, Black enrollment numbers fell slightly, while white enrollment went up. Meanwhile, at U.C. Merced, one of the least selective U.C.s, Latino enrollment numbers fell from 54 percent of the incoming freshman class to 50 percent; so did the total percentage of underrepresented minority students entering the freshman class…

If you believe, as I do, that state education should be well funded, deeply rooted in community colleges, extremely cheap and accessible to all without any of the harmful privilege engineering found in the Ivy Leagues, the progressive case for keeping standardized tests, in public schools at least, is relatively simple: The admissions process for state schools should be transparent and more or less automated. If administrators and admissions officers want to regain the public’s trust after the Varsity Blues scandal and decades of escalating tuition costs, the last thing they should do is make the process even more ornate, inexact and prone to bizarre machinations.