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By Noah Grand
Daily Bruin Reporter
The UC should abandon the SAT and develop a new test that
reflects California’s high school curriculum by 2006,
according to an Academic Senate committee report released
yesterday.
Instead, the committee report proposes students take tests in
math and English and two additional subject tests that are more
representative of California’s high school curriculum.
The College Board ““ creators of the SAT ““ and ACT
Inc. will both help the UC develop this new test, said Dorothy
Perry, chair of the Academic Senate’s Board of Admissions and
Relations with Schools that released the report.
“We are trying to set up a California exam that covers
curriculum matter that we are very concerned should be
covered,” Perry said.
While BOARS has discussed the use of the SAT in admissions since
the mid-1990s, a strong move to eliminate it was sparked in
February when UC President Richard Atkinson proposed making the SAT
I optional in UC admissions.
Currently, UC applicants must take math and verbal SAT I tests
or the ACT, and three SAT II subject tests, including a writing and
a math section.
One advantage of the proposal, according to UC Regent Velma
Montoya, is that it will reduce the amount of tests students have
to take.
“I was being concerned that students were being overly
tested,” Montoya said.
Any new test should be “fair” to all demographic
groups, Perry said.
A UC Office of the President study on the SAT in October
revealed that white and Asian American students applying to the UC
tend to score higher than Latinos, blacks and Native Americans.
However, the report does not specify how the new test would
eliminate these ethnic differences.
Other studies presented in a November conference on the SAT at
UC Santa Barbara showed that students from wealthy families average
higher SAT scores than their less wealthy counterparts, who
generally go to schools with fewer resources.
“The members of BOARS are well aware that they cannot
eliminate this level of “˜disparate impact’ admissions
tests have on students from socioeconomically disadvantaged
circumstances,” the report states.
The UCOP study also showed that the SAT II is a better predictor
of how a student will do at the UC than the SAT I, which was
founded on generalized intelligence tests.
Scores from any new test must be translatable into an equivalent
SAT or ACT score so students applying to both the UC and out of
state schools would not need to take multiple sets of tests, Perry
said.
Perry said there would be a provision for out-of-state students,
who could take another “acceptable” test.