University of California drops its SAT Subject Test requirement

February 6, 3:11 PMCollege Admissions ExaminerLauren Starkey

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While the College Board was busy congratulating itself this week on its Advanced Placement exams bridging the “equity and excellence gap” between white and non-white students (their headline doesn’t mention that this refers only to Hispanic/Latino and Native Americans, not African-Americans), it received a significant race/ethnicity-driven blow to another of its product: Subject Tests.

The University of California system announced yesterday that it is dropping the requirement of two SAT Subject Tests for the class of 2016. Since the system is the test’s biggest customer (36% of all Subject Tests are taken in California), the loss represents a significant blow to the College Board.

Inside Higher Education reported last March that the University of California was considering dropping the requirement, citing a faculty report which concluded that “many students — especially low-income and/or minority students — become ineligible to apply because they do not take the subject matter tests. While students from top high schools are steered to prepare for and take the exams, that doesn’t happen elsewhere. So the testing requirement was found [to] diminish the pool of low-income and minority students.”

While access to the tests and guidance issues were part of the problem, the cost of taking the Subject Tests was also prohibitive. Basic registration costs $20., language listening tests are $20. more, and each additional test is $9. In addition to fees, both Math tests require a graphing calculator (the least expensive graphing calculator at Staples costs $59.99), and Language tests require a portable CD player. Therefore California students taking two tests could pay well over $100. to take them.

Mark M. Rashid, chairman of the faculty committee that issued the report last summer, told The Chronicle of Higher Education in July of 2008 that each year, about 2,000 high-school students with grade-point averages above 3.5 are not considered for admission because they do not meet basic requirements, including taking the SAT Subject Tests. He noted that those students are more racially and economically diverse than the applicant pool as a whole.

What’s the College Board’s response? Again according to Inside Higher Education, “Edna Johnson, a spokeswoman for the College Board, took strong exception to the idea that the subject tests…limit the diversity of applicants. She called the tests ‘a fair, unbiased measure’ of knowledge of specific subjects. Both students and colleges gain by having this information, Johnson said….As for minority students, she said that some do better on the primary SAT and some do better on the subject tests, so minority students benefit from having all of the tests required.”

Taking into account the fact that few minority students overcome the lack of preparation for and prohibitive costs involved for taking the test, touting such a benefit seems to border on the absurd. The University of California system has been highly influential in shaping standardized testing (the College Board added the Writing section of the SAT under pressure from it four years ago), and the number of colleges that follow suit by dropping any Subject Test requirements promises to be significant.