re: University of California system to drop SAT, ACT scores from admissions officially

There might be an immigration angle to this.

Cal univ system is getting flooded with applications from China and India (combined population: 3 billion!). Every kleptocrat and corrupt businessman is spending a fortune for years of specialized tutoring teaching their children to game the standardized tests. I know a guy who makes a boatload doing this.

It's hard for them to tell Li Wang and Sandip Patel their perfect SAT scores aren't good enough, and there are hundreds and thousands of Wangs and Patels. On the other hand the schools don't want to come out with an anti-immigrant policy and say "we need to prioritize American citizens", especially after their four year temper tantrum over Trump's immigration policies.

Removing standardized test scores from the criteria gives them the leverage to construct student bodies that look, act and think the way they want them to.

University of Cal today.

Southern tomorrow.

Years ago Brown University started letting in regionally local inner city kids with good attendance and a 3.5 GPA. Pretty sure they didn't even look at standardized scores.

They probably wouldn't let me on campus to clean the toilets with a 3.5. Unless they get off on seeing a "dumb southerner" scrubbing shite. frick the lefties

Schools want more control over the racial composition of their incoming classes.

Removing a massive objective barrier to entry allows them to have more control over that process.

The reality is standardized tests are poor predictors of future success. They are used as shorthand for colleges to make a difficult decision easy.

A few years ago when I was doing my turn on the hiring committee of my law firm we hired a legal analytics company that basically does money ball for law firms. The first thing we learned is the LSAT and elite law schools have basically zero to do with job performance. In the 70 year history of my firm only 3 attorneys had been hired that did not go to a T14 and those three were horizontal hires. Since hiring them and using their advice we have hired overall a better class of lawyers, many from non T14s and many who did not test well.

Throwing out standardized testing is not an issue as long as the admissions departments are willing to do the harder work of identifying quality applicants without the shortcut provided by the SAT and ACT.

I think it is nuts that the better law schools weight the LSAT at roughly 70%. So a 3 1/2 hour test counts more than 4 years of grades in undergrad.

What the U of C system is doing actually makes a lot of sense, how it is implemented is potentially a different story.

Yeah, just frick the Asians and gifted students, right?

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This is so unfair to the high school kids who are of a more academic/scholarly bent.

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I felt the same way but in the last few months I’ve been helping 2 young adults applying to California universities for Fall 2021 and I can promise you the application process is much much much more stringent and thorough than an ACT or SAT standerized test score


Cal Berkeley received over 100k applications from some of the brightest students on the planet, I can assure you that the incoming freshman class won’t be filled with Kids that should be at River Parish CC

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because you think certain minority groups are too unintelligent to score well on them is blatant racism.

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Or its a realization they don't have the money to pay for test tutors. Poor people, whether black, white, red or purple are at a disadvantage these days when it comes to the SAT/Act.

If you struggle on the ACT then college just ain’t for you homie