4 ms·

The UC faculty opposed the SAT requirement being discarded in the first place. They were overruled by the UC Regents, and that may happen again. And even if the

The UC faculty opposed the SAT requirement being discarded in the first place. They were overruled by the UC Regents, and that may happen again. And even if the SAT is brought back, I'm sure it will be given much less weight and subjected to the "in a local context" process in the name of equity.

WalterBright 4mo ago
I took the SAT 50 some years ago. I kinda doubt I would do so well on it today without doing remedial prep work on the math.
- apparent 4mo ago
  Apologies, but which part of my comment was this a reply to?
  - WalterBright 4mo ago
    It was in the context of asking people for their SAT scores long after they had taken the tests. Perhaps I replied to the wrong person. Apologies.
- hammock 4mo ago
  The SAT is actually a lot easier today than it was when most of us took it. It is an hour or more shorter in length, the long reading passages have been replaced with short paragraphs, calculators are allowed, and vocabulary has been removed.
  - WalterBright 4mo ago
    > calculators are allowed OMG. Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway. > vocabulary has been removed. I flipped through a book that coached on SAT vocabulary. I knew all the words. Oh well. I never learned vocabulary as an explicit task. I simply read a lot. I remember one question on the SAT verbal because it irked me. It asked an analogy question which required knowledge of mixed alcoholic drinks. Since I was far from drinking age, I had no idea.
    - apparent 4mo ago
      > Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway. Graphing calculators can be used to quickly solve certain problems, like simultaneous equations or quadratics. They can also be used to plug in multiple-choice answers to see which one is correct, without knowing how to solve a problem the normal way (or not taking the time to, at any rate). The new adaptive digital SAT complicates things a bit, in that some questions are not multiple choice.
      - WalterBright 4mo ago
        When I took the SATs, it was still the slide rule daze. Graphing calculators didn't appear until many years later.
        apparent 4mo ago
        Fair enough. I'm just pointing out that calculators are not useless on the SAT. Knowing how to use the provided graphing calculator, or having your own and knowing how to use it, is very important if you want a top score.
    - hammock 4mo ago
      > OMG. Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway. No, they removed all the non-calculator “thinking” and “logic” math questions. It’s calculator stuff now. They really nerfed the crap out of the SAT. It’s so soft
      - WalterBright 4mo ago
        too bad everything is dumbed down.
      - apparent 4mo ago
        The fact that it's not all multiple choice now makes it somewhat harder. Multiple choice questions make it much faster to solve some questions because you can simply plug in possible answers. They also make it easier to know that you're right, if you solve a problem and the answer you got is one of the choices (though they do sometimes include common mistaken answers to fool students).
  - dmlittle 4mo ago
    I couldn't find a version of this video on YouTube without commentary. The reading comprehension level in the US is completely unacceptable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FdGIRBUds4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FdGIRBUds4
  - commandlinefan 4mo ago
    I never took the SAT, but I did take the GRE. The year I took it, it was 3 sections: Quantitative, Verbal and Writing. The year I took it, the writing section replaced an older Logic section. Quantitative and verbal were scored out of 800 points (like the SAT), but the writing section was scored 0-6 in half-point increments. I think the writing section has also since been removed. I need the entire paragraph above just to _explain_ my GRE (decent) score because the test has changed yet again in the interim 20 years or so and I suspect the SAT is similar.
everybodyknows 4mo ago
Regents are selected by Sacramento. At bottom, it's a political failure.
JuniperMesos 4mo ago
"Equity" is still something of a euphemism - the specific reason that the UC Regents got rid of the SAT requirement is because the non-profit law firm Public Counsel, along with a consortium of other non-profits and activist organizations, sued the UC system ostensibly on behalf of several students; and the UC Regents ended up agreeing to a settlement where they would not use SAT or ACT scores for admissions until after 2025. Public Counsel brags about the details of the lawsuit on their website (https://publiccounsel.org/our-cases/smith-v-regents-of-university-of-california/ https://publiccounsel.org/our-cases/smith-v-regents-of-unive...): > For decades, the University of California’s use of discriminatory SAT and ACT scores deprived hundreds of thousands of well-qualified students of color, students from low-income families, and students with disabilities of the opportunity to pursue higher education in the nation’s preeminent public university system. Rather than provide meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed in college, SAT and ACT scores act as stand-ins for students’ wealth and race, and thus advantage more privileged applicants. Even University leaders admit that the tests are “racist” and “correlated to wealth and privilege.” > Public Counsel and co-counsel brought this lawsuit on behalf of students and community organizations—Chinese for Affirmative Action, College Access Plan, College Seekers, Community Coalition, Dolores Huerta Foundation, and Little Manila Rising—challenging the University of California’s use of the SAT and ACT as discriminatory on the bases of race, wealth, and disability. In August 2020, Plaintiffs obtained a preliminary injunction requiring the University to immediately stop using the tests for undergraduate admissions and scholarship determinations. Plaintiffs then defeated the University’s attempts to prevent the injunction from taking effect. In the admissions cycle following the injunction, UC saw record gains in numbers of Black and Latinx students applying to and gaining admission to its campus. Public Counsel is pretty clear that the legal theory they were originally operating under is that requiring SAT and ACT scores for university admission is racially discriminatory, and the specific races it's discriminatory against are the groups they characterize as "students of color", which we can take to mean primarily black and Latino students because they specifically mention the detail "In the admissions cycle following the injunction, UC saw record gains in numbers of Black and Latinx students applying to and gaining admission to its campus.". Interestingly, the lawsuit was originally brought forward in late 2019, before the start of the COVID pandemic. The temporary injunction against using the SAT/ACT was imposed in August 2020, well into the pandemic, on the grounds that the pandemic conditions made it more difficult for applicants with disabilities to take standardized tests, in a way that was plausibly legally discriminatory - but of course this couldn't have been the primary legal justification that Public Counsel used when the brought the lawsuit in 2019, unless they were prescient enough to have predicted the course of the pandemic at that time (in my memory, the number of people in the Anglosphere who were paying attention to COVID-related news in China before the turn of 2020 and thought that it might develop into a concerning pandemic was incredibly small). The settlement that the UC Regents reached in May 2021 lasted until Spring 2025, so it's only now that it's legally possible for the UC Regents to reconsider the ban on using the SAT/ACT for admissions. Presumably, Public Counsel and the other activist groups - Chinese for Affirmative Action, College Access Plan, College Seekers, Community Coalition, Dolores Huerta Foundation, and Little Manila Rising - haven't changed their opinion that the use of the SAT/ACT is racially discriminatory towards blacks and latinos. But they don't seem to have raised another lawsuit about this, perhaps because the political environment in the US has changed since 2020 in ways that make them less optimistic about their chances of success.

WalterBright 4mo ago

I took the SAT 50 some years ago. I kinda doubt I would do so well on it today without doing remedial prep work on the math.

apparent 4mo ago
Apologies, but which part of my comment was this a reply to?
- WalterBright 4mo ago
  It was in the context of asking people for their SAT scores long after they had taken the tests. Perhaps I replied to the wrong person. Apologies.
hammock 4mo ago
The SAT is actually a lot easier today than it was when most of us took it. It is an hour or more shorter in length, the long reading passages have been replaced with short paragraphs, calculators are allowed, and vocabulary has been removed.
- WalterBright 4mo ago
  > calculators are allowed OMG. Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway. > vocabulary has been removed. I flipped through a book that coached on SAT vocabulary. I knew all the words. Oh well. I never learned vocabulary as an explicit task. I simply read a lot. I remember one question on the SAT verbal because it irked me. It asked an analogy question which required knowledge of mixed alcoholic drinks. Since I was far from drinking age, I had no idea.
  - apparent 4mo ago
    > Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway. Graphing calculators can be used to quickly solve certain problems, like simultaneous equations or quadratics. They can also be used to plug in multiple-choice answers to see which one is correct, without knowing how to solve a problem the normal way (or not taking the time to, at any rate). The new adaptive digital SAT complicates things a bit, in that some questions are not multiple choice.
    - WalterBright 4mo ago
      When I took the SATs, it was still the slide rule daze. Graphing calculators didn't appear until many years later.
      - apparent 4mo ago
        Fair enough. I'm just pointing out that calculators are not useless on the SAT. Knowing how to use the provided graphing calculator, or having your own and knowing how to use it, is very important if you want a top score.
  - hammock 4mo ago
    > OMG. Calculators are useless on the SAT anyway. No, they removed all the non-calculator “thinking” and “logic” math questions. It’s calculator stuff now. They really nerfed the crap out of the SAT. It’s so soft
    - WalterBright 4mo ago
      too bad everything is dumbed down.
    - apparent 4mo ago
      The fact that it's not all multiple choice now makes it somewhat harder. Multiple choice questions make it much faster to solve some questions because you can simply plug in possible answers. They also make it easier to know that you're right, if you solve a problem and the answer you got is one of the choices (though they do sometimes include common mistaken answers to fool students).
- dmlittle 4mo ago
  I couldn't find a version of this video on YouTube without commentary. The reading comprehension level in the US is completely unacceptable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FdGIRBUds4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FdGIRBUds4
- commandlinefan 4mo ago
  I never took the SAT, but I did take the GRE. The year I took it, it was 3 sections: Quantitative, Verbal and Writing. The year I took it, the writing section replaced an older Logic section. Quantitative and verbal were scored out of 800 points (like the SAT), but the writing section was scored 0-6 in half-point increments. I think the writing section has also since been removed. I need the entire paragraph above just to _explain_ my GRE (decent) score because the test has changed yet again in the interim 20 years or so and I suspect the SAT is similar.

everybodyknows 4mo ago

Regents are selected by Sacramento. At bottom, it's a political failure.

JuniperMesos 4mo ago

"Equity" is still something of a euphemism - the specific reason that the UC Regents got rid of the SAT requirement is because the non-profit law firm Public Counsel, along with a consortium of other non-profits and activist organizations, sued the UC system ostensibly on behalf of several students; and the UC Regents ended up agreeing to a settlement where they would not use SAT or ACT scores for admissions until after 2025. Public Counsel brags about the details of the lawsuit on their website (https://publiccounsel.org/our-cases/smith-v-regents-of-university-of-california/ https://publiccounsel.org/our-cases/smith-v-regents-of-unive...): > For decades, the University of California’s use of discriminatory SAT and ACT scores deprived hundreds of thousands of well-qualified students of color, students from low-income families, and students with disabilities of the opportunity to pursue higher education in the nation’s preeminent public university system. Rather than provide meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed in college, SAT and ACT scores act as stand-ins for students’ wealth and race, and thus advantage more privileged applicants. Even University leaders admit that the tests are “racist” and “correlated to wealth and privilege.” > Public Counsel and co-counsel brought this lawsuit on behalf of students and community organizations—Chinese for Affirmative Action, College Access Plan, College Seekers, Community Coalition, Dolores Huerta Foundation, and Little Manila Rising—challenging the University of California’s use of the SAT and ACT as discriminatory on the bases of race, wealth, and disability. In August 2020, Plaintiffs obtained a preliminary injunction requiring the University to immediately stop using the tests for undergraduate admissions and scholarship determinations. Plaintiffs then defeated the University’s attempts to prevent the injunction from taking effect. In the admissions cycle following the injunction, UC saw record gains in numbers of Black and Latinx students applying to and gaining admission to its campus. Public Counsel is pretty clear that the legal theory they were originally operating under is that requiring SAT and ACT scores for university admission is racially discriminatory, and the specific races it's discriminatory against are the groups they characterize as "students of color", which we can take to mean primarily black and Latino students because they specifically mention the detail "In the admissions cycle following the injunction, UC saw record gains in numbers of Black and Latinx students applying to and gaining admission to its campus.". Interestingly, the lawsuit was originally brought forward in late 2019, before the start of the COVID pandemic. The temporary injunction against using the SAT/ACT was imposed in August 2020, well into the pandemic, on the grounds that the pandemic conditions made it more difficult for applicants with disabilities to take standardized tests, in a way that was plausibly legally discriminatory - but of course this couldn't have been the primary legal justification that Public Counsel used when the brought the lawsuit in 2019, unless they were prescient enough to have predicted the course of the pandemic at that time (in my memory, the number of people in the Anglosphere who were paying attention to COVID-related news in China before the turn of 2020 and thought that it might develop into a concerning pandemic was incredibly small). The settlement that the UC Regents reached in May 2021 lasted until Spring 2025, so it's only now that it's legally possible for the UC Regents to reconsider the ban on using the SAT/ACT for admissions. Presumably, Public Counsel and the other activist groups - Chinese for Affirmative Action, College Access Plan, College Seekers, Community Coalition, Dolores Huerta Foundation, and Little Manila Rising - haven't changed their opinion that the use of the SAT/ACT is racially discriminatory towards blacks and latinos. But they don't seem to have raised another lawsuit about this, perhaps because the political environment in the US has changed since 2020 in ways that make them less optimistic about their chances of success.