From the L.A. Times:
UC must immediately drop use of the SAT and ACT for admissions and scholarships, judge rules
By TERESA WATANABE STAFF WRITER
SEP. 1, 2020 12:43 PMThe University of California must immediately suspend all use of SAT and ACT test scores for admission and scholarship decisions under a preliminary injunction issued by an Alameda County Superior Court judge.
The ruling came in a lawsuit asserting that the use of standardized test scores is broadly biased — and particularly detrimental to students with disabilities who seek to take the test during the coronavirus crisis.
Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman said in his Monday ruling that plaintiffs had shown sufficient cause to stop the tests for now because applicants with disabilities had virtually no access to test-taking sites or legally required accommodations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The barriers faced by students with disabilities have been greatly exacerbated by the COVID-19 epidemic, which has disrupted test-taking locations, closed schools and limited access to school counselors,” Seligman wrote.
Seligman added that little data existed to show whether the tests were even valid or reliable indicators of their future college performance. …
Sure, Judge, sure … Besides the fact that it is 2020 and all this has been studied ad infinitum for the better part of a century, there was just a report released last winter by the official U of California faculty commission to investigate standardized testing, which found the SAT not just complementary to high school GPA but superior on a stand-alone basis.
The injunction on the use of SAT and ACT results will affect all California applicants to the UC system.
“The SAT and ACT are dead and gone as far as the UC system is concerned,” said Mark Rosenbaum, a Los Angeles attorney who helped file the lawsuit as director of Public Counsel’s Opportunity Under Law project. The “historic decision puts an end to racist tests that deprived countless California students of color, students with disabilities, and students from low-income families of a fair shot at admissions to the UC system.”
Rosenbaum said he and his team targeted only the UC system to efficiently manage the case but that the court’s reasoning should apply to all colleges and universities, both public and private, across the country.
“If other universities don’t follow, we’ll come after them as well,” he said, adding that he would be conferring with civil and disability rights advocates in other states. …
Earlier this year,
On May 21, 2020:
the UC Board of Regents unanimously voted to phase out standardized test scores in admissions decisions after concluding that the tests were unacceptably biased based on race, income and parent education level and did not provide useful information about how students would fare in college. Regents voted to make the tests optional this year and next, then phase them out …
The May plan by the board of regents was to make them optional thru 2024 (i.e., Asians and whites better submit test scores, blacks and Latinos don’t bother, thus boosting scores reported to USNWR). Then in 2025, UC would introduce its own miracle test on which, presumably, all races would score the same and everybody would live happily ever after.
The only question was: Why didn’t anybody ever think of inventing a non-racist test before?
Some accommodations, such as Braille and large-print exams, 100% extended time for tests and computers for those who cannot hand write essays, are only available at high school testing centers, but those have been closed during the coronavirus crisis, said Abigail Graber, an attorney with Brown, Goldstein & Levy, a Baltimore law firm representing the plaintiffs. …
So COVID is being used as an excuse to get rid of this system that has worked fairly well for three generations and with no backup plan.
For going on three decades, I’ve been pointing out that our elites and their institutions don’t act like they believe the politically correct assertions they emit. For example, our prestigious universities have grown ever more prestigious by admitting intelligent students by using standardized tests that show marked differences in average scores among the races.
And, I’d say, that hypocrisy is a good thing. Hypocrisy is better than stupidity when you are in charge of important functions.
It almost seems as if 2020 was the year that America’s elites decided that they were going to prove Sailer wrong by taking up his challenge and stop being hypocritical: In the new non-hypocritical America, blacks don’t have to be arrested if they aren’t in the mood, dumb kids can go to Berkeley, etc. etc.
But, I think what really is going on is this:
Elites didn’t actually admit to themselves they were hypocritical. They just didn’t think much about it. Taking the SAT was what you did. That’s how things worked. It wasn’t hypocrisy that was keeping America running, it was inertia. The huge conflict between the political correctness that everybody who was anybody publicly swore to and the things you need to do to keep a modern civilization working (e.g., arrest blacks more than you arrest Asians) were not much on the agenda. Everybody’s budget just went up 2% per year and that was okay.
But then the coronavirus came along, and lots of things had to be improvised. Cities had no money, so who would get the axe: the police or the social workers? Defund the police!
The spring SAT was canceled, so then what was the next step? Abolish college admissions testing!
It turned out that because the common sense arguments had been edged out of the Overton Window over the years, in the debates about how to alter arrangements in 2020 were dominated by the politically correct, because dissent had been declared a firing offense.
So now, in the rearranging, the Woke have the whip hand, and they are doing all sorts of stupid, dysfunctional things in the name of Racial Reckoning.
