She is also one of the five original authors of the UC STEM faculty open letter urging the University of California to restore the SAT and ACT.
Does anyone remember why UC got rid of SAT and ACT admissions to begin with?
California groups demand UC drop the SAT, alleging it illegally discriminates against disadvantaged students (archive.is)
Critics, however, say the exams are an unfair admission barrier to students who don’t test well or can’t afford to pay for pricey test preparation. Decades of research have shown that scores are strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race.
I can say from personal experience that privatized test-taking classes and insider info from test-prep companies that also author the tests themselves raised my SAT score from the mid-1100s to the 1500s over the course of a few months. I don’t believe my core mathematical skills improved so dramatically during this time. But I gained a ton of insight into answering a specific kind of question quickly and accurately for the purpose of testing well.
And this trend is not unique to the SAT/ACT standardized testing regime. We’ve been experimenting with all sorts of standardized testing strategies down in Texas, and they have become a suffocating weight across all grade levels that fail to produce any noticeable improvement in education outcomes. Instead, we’ve seen standardized testing used as a tool of the state government to take over local school districts - HISD in 2023 and now AISD in 2026 - by shutting down poorer schools while funneling wealthier students into privatized programs.
Meanwhile, the cost to create, maintain, and administer these tests is astronomical, running up to $70/student/exam and amounting to billions annually.
It seems that students who “can’t do middle school math” would be easily identified during the college admissions process by their… high school GPA. I haven’t seen anything in this article that explains why students seeking admittance to Berkeley - especially students walking in the door with advanced mathematics credits from AP exams - would be unable to answer basic Algebra problems. Or why a school was passing over specific students with straight As in math subjects, while admitting students who were flunking remedial classes. But the article fails to address this question. It does include a very bizarre graph
which seems to compare 2018 apples (ALEKS placements) to 2023 oranges (MDTP topics passed). I can also say from personal experience that proficiency in a subject matter in high school standardized testing is no guarantee of performance on a college-school exam in a heavily curved weed-out course. Any relationship between these two measures will tenuous at best.
Schools that find themselves inundated with students interested in a particular subject will routinely curb enthusiasm by gating upper-level classes behind mandatory lower-level courses that deliberately flunk north of 30% of students through grueling homework and exam filters. That’s before you get into student lifestyles between at-home high school life and campus college life - drinking and poor diet, romantic drama, biting off more courses than you can chew, juggling part-time work to make ends meet - all of which can ruin college careers.
How on earth does the SAT/ACT solve for any of that? The article doesn’t say. But it was written by a professor with an award-winning reputation… from a private organization whose awards are sponsored by the owners of the SAT and its exam prep affilates.
So that’s something to chew on.
To answer at least part of this: I’ve heard that high school teachers in failing schools were put under enormous pressure by administrators (who themselves were pressured by state level policies) to pass a large fraction of their students.
This is true. Teachers get a ton of pressure to pass under performers and get creative with how.
You’re going to need a gatekeeping system (entrance exam) between high school and college if you want students who can actually read, write, add, and subtract. High school education has mostly been gutted across the US.
At many universities you’re still going to get students admitted on sports scholarships that don’t meet academic requirements. Sports brings in big money to universities.
So you’ve got a bunch of kids walking out the door with D- in Trigonometry.
I have no idea how that affects admissions at Berkeley, especially when the Op-Ed writer claims kids with straight As in Calc II who are getting passed over.
The SAT doesn’t even test for this. It caps out at Algebra and Geometry. Why go to bat for a program that is testing under what freshmen at Berkeley would be presumably be admitted for?
They can’t get funding otherwise and the whole school would fall. They see it as letting a few bad ones through for the good of all. You know what they say about apples though.
Well, yeah, most of what separates which college a person goes to is money rather than skill; although we do like to pretend that prestigious schools only accept more skilled students.
But I am curious about something. Do the fancy schools have the kind of catch-up programs and classes that community colleges do?
How did these students get accepted to Berkeley then? Aren’t there entrance exams?
because there is no requirement for passing a math test to get into Berkley. US higher ed has no entrance exams.
students got passing grades in math coursework, sure, but that does mean they know how to do math, because schools don’t teach it. same with reading and writing.
high schools and education in general, is all about passing as many people as possible, it’s not about rigorous educational standards and sorting.
many students come from educational systems of varying quality, some of which were rigorous, some of which were not. and they won’t know that until they get their ass kicked in higher education.
and the administrators solution is to lower standards, because that’s easier than having kids do remedial work.
I got into Harvard. I got my ass kicked, because I was from a poor school and underprepared. I managed to work my way up from a C student freshman year, to a A student by Junior year. I had to re-learn grammar, algebra, and reading skills, but I was able to do it. Just because kids don’t know it coming in doesn’t mean they are not capable of learning it and succeeding.
In my high school I was like top of my class and had 3.8 GPA. And freshman year while I was struggling and working my ass off to get Cs, there were people who barely worked who got As, because they had gone to elite private schools and had been taking college-level coursework for years already, who already had not only academic knowledge, but all the social elite entitlement, if they got anything less than an A they’d harass their professors to bump their grade, and I was terrified to even go to office hours to ask for basic help.
A lot of students are also just entitled lazy assholes who refuse to learn and blame the professor/teacher.
Whatever happened to the SAT test? My generation couldn’t get into a decent university without a respectable SAT score. Did universities decide enrollment money was more important than the school’s reputation?
SAT only tests for like middle school math. and it was dropped by a lot of places as a requirement to apply.
SAT also is dumb, because all it really tests is how well you take the SAT. most rich kids just hire tutors to ace it. my own nephew upped his score by 200 points on it after his parents dropped $5K in SAT prep tutors. he is terrible at math, but he nailed the SAT. he’s never taking calculus anyway and he hates math, but he has a B+ in calculus. like most people his age, he can’t do arithmetic in his head, let alone algebra, because everything is on his phone and every tip he’s paid at a restaurant is a button on a screen.
It is not a measure of mathematical ability or knowledge in any way. The SAT tutors basically just teach you how to guess more quickly because the highest score comes not from knowing things, but answering the most amount of questions in the alloted time. It’s a test of time management more than anything else.
They used to have more advanced SAT subject tests, but those are no longer around. I took one that covered pre-calc, but that was 25 years ago. I had to submit SAT and three SAT subject tests for my college applications. I aced all those SAT tests. I still got my ass handed to me freshman year and almost failed out of freshman calculus. Basically freshman calclus was Calc 1 and 2 compressed into one semester and proof-focused… I had never seen a proof in my life… so yeah I barely passed because all I had been taught was calc 1 in terms of using algebraic equations. the exams for that class were basically asking us to derive proofs for principles of calculus…
The truth is Calculus at bumfucksville HS is not the same as it as St John’s Prep. And a college has a hard time accounting for that, and so do the students. So you have two students going into Calc 2 at uni, who have wildly different backgrounds, though they took the same coursework, technically. Hell I had friends who took AP calculus and then failed/struggled college calculus the next year…
And if not entrance exams, there should at least be placement exams, where a low score means you get placed into remedial classes instead of straight into calculus.
I suppose the billionaires have decided that the more educated a person is the more “uppity” they are, and since AI and robots will be doing everything soon, they’re better off with an ignorant populace.
Also, what’s with the AI logo for this comm? Do better, mods.
