In a landmark 2021 settlement by the University of California (UC), the nation’s most prestigious state university system, officials agreed to eliminate the requirement that students submit college entrance exam scores to gain admission. When then-UC president Janet Napolitano initially proposed suspending the testing requirement in 2020, her statement claimed that eliminating testing requirements would “enhance equity.” Critics of college admissions exams have increasingly argued that testing requirements are bad for equity in higher education, and have often gone even further, painting the SAT and ACT as simply racist. For example, the left-leaning groups that brought the UC lawsuit called the tests “discriminatory,” and their lawsuit cited then-UC regent Cecilia Estolano, who said of the SAT, “We all know it’s a racist test.”
In this inaugural policy brief in the Fordham Institute’s Think Again series (see more about the series here), I tackle the pervasive notion that college admissions exams are responsible for racial and socioeconomic inequities in higher education.
The claim that that the SAT and ACT discriminate relies on statistical analysis of the average performance of students of different racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Gaps in average exam scores are, of course, no myth. The average ACT composite score is about 20, but the highest-scoring racial/ethnic group, Asian students, scores 24.9 on average, while Black students, the lowest-scoring group, have an average score of 16.3. For some, the existence of such a gap is alone sufficient to prove the tests are racist. Yet students of different groups do not all have the same family and school experiences. Black children, for example, are three times as likely as their Asian and White classmates to grow up in poverty. Childhood disparities in access to everything from health care to good schools and teachers mean that—whatever those disparities say about the roots and consequences of American inequality—it would be surprising if all groups of seventeen-year-olds exhibited equivalent levels of college readiness. But as the brief explains, all measures of academic achievement exhibit such gaps.
Far from being instruments of systemic racism, the SAT and ACT are put through extensive measures to ensure that the exams do not discriminate against students because of their racial or ethnic background (or class or gender). The organizations that administer the exams vet them intensely, not just by diverse review panels that alert the test makers to any potential cultural biases, but also through statistical techniques that flag test questions answered differently by students from different backgrounds. This latter process alerts test makers to any questions that, after controlling for students’ overall scores, two groups of students (e.g., students from high-income and low-income families) answer correctly at different rates. Officials at both testing companies implement multiple, overlapping systems designed to ensure that the exams are free of such biased questions before they could affect any student’s score.
The claim that the SAT and ACT drive inequities in higher education feeds the movement against standardized testing and has been at the heart of successful court cases. But in this new brief, I argue that, whether colleges decide to go “test optional” or not, the implications for equity are actually quite minimal.
Editor’s note: This is a modified excerpt of the inaugural policy brief in the Fordham Institute’s new Think Again series of policy briefs, “Think Again: College Admissions Exams Drive Higher Education Inequities,” written by Fordham National Research Director Adam Tyner. Read the brief in full here.
