The University of California must immediately suspend use of SAT or ACT test scores for admission and scholarship decisions, an Alameda County Superior Court judge has ruled.
The University of California must immediately suspend all use of SAT and ACT test scores for admission and scholarship decisions under a preliminary injunction issued by an Alameda County Superior Court judge.
The ruling came in a lawsuit asserting that the use of standardized test scores is broadly biased — and particularly detrimental to students with disabilities who seek to take the test during the coronavirus crisis.
Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman said in his Monday ruling that plaintiffs had shown sufficient cause to stop the tests for now because applicants with disabilities had virtually no access to test-taking sites or legally required accommodations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The barriers faced by students with disabilities have been greatly exacerbated by the COVID-19 epidemic, which has disrupted test-taking locations, closed schools and limited access to school counselors,” Seligman wrote.
Seligman added that little data existed to show whether the tests were even valid or reliable indicators of their future college performance. He set a case management conference for Sept. 29.
The injunction on the use of SAT and ACT results will affect all California applicants to the UC system.
“The SAT and ACT are dead and gone as far as the UC system is concerned,” said Mark Rosenbaum, a Los Angeles attorney who helped file the lawsuit as director of Public Counsel’s Opportunity Under Law project.
The “historic decision puts an end to racist tests that deprived countless California students of color, students with disabilities, and students from low-income families of a fair shot at admissions to the UC system.”
UC officials had no immediate comment Tuesday.SAT and ACT officials could not be immediately reached for comment but have long argued that their tests are not discriminatory and provide a uniform and useful yardstick to assess applicants from different schools and states.
Earlier this year, the UC Board of Regents unanimously voted to phase out standardized test scores in admissions decisions after concluding that the tests were unacceptably biased based on race, income and parent education level and did not provide useful information about how students would fare in college. Regents voted to make the tests optional for two years, then phase them out, but still allowed them to be used for scholarship decisions.
UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz already have decided to drop the SAT and ACT testing requirements altogether, but UCLA and the system’s five other undergraduate campuses had planned to consider the scores for applicants who chose to submit them, according to the ruling. UC campuses will begin accepting applications for admission to the 2021-22 academic year on Nov. 1.