University of California is sued over use of SAT and ACT in admissions

A coalition of students, several advocacy groups and a California school district said they would file suit against the University of California system Tuesday to stop it from using standardized test scores in its admissions.

The plaintiffs say the college entrance tests, the SAT and ACT, are racially and socioeconomically biased. By basing admissions decisions on those tests, they say, the system illegally discriminates against applicants on the basis of their race and wealth, and denies them equal protection under the California Constitution.

Supporters of the tests say that they provide a uniform way of judging students from different schools and backgrounds, but should be used in combination with other factors like high school grades and parental education level.

The litigation comes as the state system is already embroiled in a debate over whether to continue using the tests to judge the nearly 200,000 high school students who apply to the system each year.

For the University of California system, one of the country’s biggest and most prestigious public higher education systems, to drop the standardized testing requirement would be a major blow to the reputation of the tests.

More than 1,000 colleges and universities across the country have already made standardized test scores optional for admission, according to FairTest, an advocacy group that wants to do away with the tests.

For procedural reasons, lawyers said, the school district, in Compton, California, is filing one lawsuit and the rest of the plaintiffs are filing another.

California has struggled to maintain diversity at the top levels of its university system since voters adopted a ban on affirmative action in 1996. In an announcement of the lawsuits, FairTest said that the racial disparities in test scores for California students were stark. It said that according to 2018 data for California students from the College Board, which administers the SAT, 44% of white students scored 1200 or above, compared with only 10% of black students and 12% of Hispanic students.

Carol Christ, the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the system’s most competitive universities, and Michael Brown, the system’s chief academic officer, have recently criticized the tests. Chancellor Christ said last month at an education symposium that she was “very much in favor of doing away with the SAT or ACT as a requirement for application,” because it contributed to the inequities of the system.