Joining

From the Daily Cal: ...Endorsing their STEM colleagues’ petition, more than 120 humanities and social science professors across the UC system released an open letter Thursday urging the university to go beyond the STEM letter call by including the SAT and ACT’s verbal reasoning requirement as well. Stefano DellaVigna, who is the chair of UC Berkeley’s economics department and who signed the humanities letter, said in an email some student difficulties are most likely a result of “Covid shock,” but SAT and ACT scores are better able to predict college success compared to high school grades.

...The humanities letter marks an escalation of a faculty-led campaign to reverse the 2020 UC Board of Regents decision to remove all standardized testing requirements from freshman admissions. While the STEM letter focuses on declining math skills, the humanities letter argues the alleged harms of test-blind admissions extend across disciplines. “Without foundational literacy, students face difficulties across university disciplines,” the letter states. “Eliminating the metrics that diagnose these preparation gaps imposed significant barriers for underprepared students and their instructors alike.”

The letter additionally challenges that standardized testing requirements are inequitable, arguing that “no admissions criterion is uncorrelated with social background,” and asserts that extracurricular activities and essay writing style are strongly associated with social class...

Mina Aganagic, math and physics professor at UC Berkeley, wrote in an email that the timeline in BOARS’ roadmap does not allow enough time for standardized testing requirements to be reinstated by the 2027 admissions cycle, which is the timing the open letter requested. Aganagic’s signature is first on the STEM petition.

“The BOARs roadmap would delay the process by a year at least,” Aganagic said in the email. “This means a whole extra generation of ten’s of thousands of freshmen, and hundreds of thousands of applicants, would be admitted by a nearly blinded, AI and grade inflation randomized admissions process.”

Aganagic also questioned the proposed roadmap, claiming that the UC system will redo research it has already conducted and arguing that the changes to the SAT, including becoming digital, “are unlikely to affect earlier findings.” ...

Full story at https://www.dailycal.org/news/uc/joining-stem-faculty-uc-humanities-faculty-endorse-use-of-standardized-tests-in-admissions-as-academic/article_a90605be-44b9-4d92-9ada-e165b20588bf.html.

As we have noted in a separate post today, the BOARS "roadmap" approach - which was developed before the current petitions - seems unresponsive to the concerns being expressed. There are better approaches such as an expedited study over the summer, followed by Regents discussion at the September meetings. Unfortunately, being responsive or not seems to be in the discretion of the chair of the Academic Council who prefers "not."