California Defines Testing Down. Ignoring faculty, the UC president wants to drop the SAT and ACT.

As higher education braces for the impact of coronavirus, the nation’s largest university system is poised to undermine the value of its own degrees by dropping admissions testing for political reasons.

Last week University of California President Janet Napolitano released a plan to stop using the SAT and ACT in admissions. The tests would be optional for freshmen applying to enter in 2022 and excluded except in certain circumstances for 2023 and 2024. Ms. Napolitano hopes the university can create its own test for 2025, but even if that’s not possible she wants the tests scrapped entirely from then on.

The math and reading tests have faced escalating attacks from progressives because black and Hispanic students score lower than whites and Asians on average, and one activist group sued the UC late last year. Yet an exhaustive UC faculty senate report, commissioned by Ms. Napolitano and released this year, found the tests aren’t discriminatory and play an important role in protecting educational quality.

Surveying data from tens of thousands of students, the commission found the SAT and ACT “add substantially to UC’s ability to predict student success” beyond high school grades, especially for minority groups. It said UC “does not appear to use standardized test scores in a way that amplifies racial disparities.”

The report found the top obstacle for minority students is not testing but failing to complete required high-school courses. It also suggested that worsening grade inflation, especially at wealthy high schools, makes an objective assessment especially important.

The progressive UC faculty are not indifferent to the prospects of disadvantaged Californians. The committee scrutinized the data for evidence of bias. Yet test gaps reflect differences in levels of preparedness, exacerbated by California’s unaccountable K-12 public schools. Faculty have an interest in ensuring the students they teach are prepared.

When I was in the ninth grade in 1994, I had a teacher who failed every student in one of his classes with the exception of one mentally retarded boy, who earned an A. He came to every class on time, paid attention, followed instructions, and tried his best to answer the questions on the tests. The administration obviously wasn’t happy. But we had a law at the time that required chronically absent students to obtain permission from the governor to pass a class, and many of those other students had neither attended the requisite number of classes nor obtained the gubernatorial override. So the teacher’s grades withstood the administration scrutiny, and the system retained him for several additional years. After that school year, the family of the retarded boy moved away in an attempt to find a school that did not expose him to frequent physical violence.

This year presents a bizarre situation. The school systems should endeavor to make up the missed classes with regular instruction at the earliest opportunity under normal protocols. Perhaps school will resume in August, and this school year finishes in October or November. The next school year then would begin a week later, with additional classes on Saturdays and holidays to make up the missed time from the delayed start. Alternatively, they can fail every student because no student met the attendance requirements. Schools can’t honestly pass students who do not pass the final examination. It only shows that schools and their credentials are a farce. The diploma certifies then not educational attainment but conformity to an arbitrary system of rules for a protracted period.

Oh yes. The IEP is the academic equivalent of Diplomatic Immunity. They told us a few years ago that a parent of a special ed kid could sue individual teachers and take their retirement. I don’t know if that was just a wild threat to terrorize us into passing their kids or not, but it worked. I can’t express my relief that I’m getting out now.

Schools can’t honestly pass students who do not pass the final examination. It only shows that schools and their credentials are a farce.

Yep. But that's exactly what LAUSD is doing. And I have fought against all their nonsense for the previous 15 years, but this year? I'll hand out the C's and bail. Clearly it means nothing anyway. They're officially a diploma mill, and I want no further part of it. (But it has been a stomach twister, let me tell you.)

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