Dear Editor,
The UC-wide faculty committee Board of Admissions and
Relations with Schools has proposed a new admissions policy that includes
eliminating the SAT II subject test requirement and the rigid use of other
criteria to determine who is UC-eligible. If passed and correctly implemented,
it would increase the opportunities of Latino, black, American Indian,
Filipino, rural and low-income students of all races to attend a UC school. The
UC faculty and regents must adopt this proposal.
The UC system has grown increasingly segregated since
Proposition 209,
affirmative action ban, passed. In 2007, UCSD’s freshman class was only 16.4
percent Latino, black and American Indian, while these groups comprise 43.7
percent of
school graduates.
The B.O.A.R.S. proposal would allow UC campuses to reverse
this. The proposal is modest, reasonable and long overdue. It would replace the
university’s mechanical eligibility formula, which uses academically unsound
criteria to automatically disqualify thousands of students, a disproportionate
number of whom are underrepresented or low-income.
The university’s own studies reveal that the SAT II (and the
SAT I) does not correlate with college success and completion rates.
In
62 percent of Latino and 65 percent of black high school graduates who complete
the university’s “a-g” requirements do not take the SAT II. This is due to the
lack of counselors in segregated, under-resourced schools and racial
stereotyping from counselors who do not prepare students properly. This
arbitrary and discriminatory barrier must be removed.
The B.O.A.R.S. proposal would allow the system to consider
students who fall short of the “a-g” requirements. Currently, 45 percent of
high schools don’t offer enough “a-g” classes for all students to meet the
requirement. Disproportionately, the schools that don’t offer these classes are
majority Latino and/or black. Punishing students in segregated schools who do
not meet these requirements is racist and unfair.
The B.O.A.R.S.
proposal should be adopted, but with two important amendments. First,
the proposal currently eliminates the guarantee of admission to the top 12.5
percent of
school graduates. It must be amended to restore this, both to prevent any
counter position of an increase in underrepresented minority student enrollment
to this guarantee, and because the guarantee is democratic, benefitting all
students, including its rapidly increasing Latino student population.
Second, the proposal would more likely achieve substantial
increases in underrepresented student enrollment if it were amended to
eliminate the use of the
Numerous studies have been conducted on the racist and economic bias of the
SAT. The demand for eliminating the SAT I has been raised in the UC system for
many years — including by former UC President Richard Atkinson, the ASUC and
the UC Latino Eligibility Task Force.
The SAT and other standardized tests do not measure
intellectual ability or potential. They stigmatize minority and poor students
while giving an unfair advantage to white and privileged students. Eliminating
the SAT is necessary to protect meaningful gains in underrepresented student
enrollment from the threat of right-wing lawsuits and demagoguery.
— Ronald Cruz
Organizer, Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration
and Immigrant Rights
