California was in a state of emergency long before the deregulation of its electricity system. Its network of higher public education, the University of California system, has slowly become more and more homogeneous since 1996. The passing of proposition 209 is at fault for this deterioration of diversity.
Prop. 209 abolished affirmative action in state agencies, including all nine schools in the UC system. This means that the University of California schools now look only at numbers. SAT scores and GPA have become the main qualifying factors for admission - no more looking at the whole package. Not only has the number of accepted Latino, African-American, and Native-American students dropped, but the application rate has also dropped significantly, especially to UCLA and UC Berkeley.
How can an educational system truly keep an acceptance policy that discourages minority students from even applying? The answer is: It cannot.
Last week, the president of the University of California system, Richard Atkinson, announced that he wants the UC system to abandon its use of the SAT in determining admission. It is his belief that this change will combat the effect of abolishing affirmative action in California. His decision comes as a surprise to many, including university presidents from around the country. Why would Atkinson decide to reform the admissions process in this manner? The answer is clear: The SAT and the reasoning behind its administration are both meaningless.
The more we learn about cognitive development and cognitive abilities, the more we realize that SAT scores are, essentially, empty. Understanding the SAT relies upon having basic understanding of psychometrics, the use of measuring and testing to gain insight into how well a person's mind works. Psychometrics claims that IQ tests, and thus the SAT, prove that intelligence is unchanging and measurable. Our belief that the IQ test is an accurate representation of one's mental abilities is evidence of our belief in the myth of psychometrics.
The SAT is just another IQ test with a different scale. Thus, the faults of psychometrics must be applied to the SAT. If psychometrics is true, it thus follows that our ability to master (or not master) the SAT is determined at birth and does not change. But one would be hard pressed to find a student at Tufts, or at any other elite university, who did not engage in some form of test preparation for the SAT in order to raise his/her score. If Kaplan, Princeton Review, and their colleagues are correct in claiming that they can improve an individual's ability to perform on the SAT, then we must conclude that the claims behind the SAT are incorrect. Obviously, one's mental abilities do change.
Furthermore, recent research in the field of cognitive development shows that there is no such thing as general intelligence _ the very thing that the SAT claims to measure. Rather, intelligence is better measured through Howard Gardner's system of multiple intelligences, which, among others, takes into account bodily kinesthetic intelligence (one's ability to use one's body, or excel in athletics), musical intelligence, and interpersonal intelligence (the intelligence necessary to understand and relate to others), as well as linguistic intelligence and logical mathematical intelligence _ the two that the SAT claims to measure.
It follows, then, that the SAT is an incomplete test at best. According to the theory of multiple intelligences, which is now embraced by educators worldwide, the SAT measures, at most, two of a person's eight intelligences. Thus, we see that mental ability is not measurable, at least not through one multiple-choice test. We can evaluate each intelligence and set standards for what is considered an extraordinary amount of a given intelligence, but we cannot claim that there is one general intelligence that the SAT measures.
So what exactly does the SAT measure? As far as we can tell, it measures only one's ability to take the SAT. One can hardly claim that a college should be interested in a candidate's ability to take a random, timed, multiple-choice test, when determining how much that candidate can offer to the college community. For the sake of efficiency, testing cannot be abolished in the college admissions process; but this testing must take on a new focus. SAT II's, or achievement tests, should replace the SAT. These tests do actually measure one's mental abilities in individual subjects. Furthermore, colleges must start more actively evaluating other forms of intelligence that cannot be evaluated through standardized tests. For example, to evaluate interpersonal intelligence, colleges can request peer recommendations and to evaluate musical intelligence, colleges can more actively encourage students to submit tapes and original compositions.
It is time for the college admissions process to catch up to contemporary findings in the field of cognitive development. Proof that the SAT is a satisfactory method of evaluating mental abilities is most definitely not part of those findings.
Based on the most recent findings about intelligence, we can only hope that Richard Atkinson's proposal passes and that more schools follow suit. California is in dire need of a new admissions system that will promote diversity and will not discourage minorities from applying to the UC schools. In addition, it is time for more colleges and universities to see the SAT for what it really is _ a test that does not actually measure intelligence and is part of an outdated and disproved system of evaluating cognitive abilities. To compare applicants based on the results of this test is unfair and pointless.
Paula Romero, a California resident, is a junior majoring in child development. She is a production manager at the Daily. Laura Israel is a freshman who has not yet declared a major. She is viewpoints editor at the Daily.
