How Do You Know?

All of my professional career inside a Texas K-12 school district, decisions were made about kids based on standardized testing. Standardized tests have long been criticized for being culturally biased and forcing teachers to “teach to the test” by narrowing the curriculum and causing significant test anxiety in the students taking them. But as a good friend of mine, who served as a school board member for a large, urban district, continued to plead, “Scott, if you don’t test, how do you know?”

The University of California system abandoned the use of standardized tests in making admission decisions during the pandemic and, unlike many of its peer institutions, has neither restored their use nor announced any plans to do so. But there seems to be interest on behalf of some of the UC Berkeley faculty to reinstate standardized testing as a decision-maker for admissions and course placement.

As The Atlantic reported in a recent post,

“Zvesdelina Stankova has taught mathematics at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades. But in 2023, while teaching introductory calculus for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she noticed that something was quite wrong. The bottom 25 percent of students were not just struggling with the coursework, …[but] ‘people were in freefall.’ Teaching was becoming impossible. ‘With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x – 2 = 5,’ Stankova said.”

“Mina Aganagic, a string theorist at Berkeley who has taught calculus for 20 years, noticed something similar. ‘I realized that for students to follow me,’ she told me, ‘I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.’ The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to ‘the meaning of equals in an equation.’ Both professors said their students came to office hourse and still tried hard to pass – often by trying to commit equations to memory when they could not understand them. But however hard they worked, most of the students who arrived to calculus class without knowing algebra failed.”

“Late last month, Stankova and Aganagic, along with three other Berkeley professors, published an open letter arguing for the reinstatement of those testing requirements – at least for any students seeking science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degrees. ‘Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students,’ they wrote. Their letter came only six months after UC San Diego released a shocking report finding that one in 12 of its incoming students struggled with even middle-school math. Since the letter’s publication, more than 1,400 professors and lecturers have co-signed it.”

“The unending debates about standardized tests long ago became kabuki. They are not really about whether knowledge or trigonometry is latent classism, but about the trade-offs that selective universities are forced to make in balancing academic excellence with efforts to serve underprivileged applicants.”

“Supporters see tests such as the SAT as objective measures of academic preparation, allowing comparison among students no matter how varied their actual schooling. Tests can help identify the excellent students attending mediocre high schools and, conversely, the mediocre students attending excellent schools.”

“Rather than interpreting these gaps as a barometer of educational inequality, critics cast standardized tests as oppressive tools in their own right, because they reinforce inequality. Because the tests were correlated with privilege, the argument goes, they must simply be measures of privilege itself. Yet the same objection could be levied at all of the other materials used in college admissions – high school transcripts, essays, lists of extracurricular activities – which also favor students from wealthy, well-educated families.”

In addition to the standardized testing controversy, there are other problems with higher education’s ability to make good acceptance decisions:

“Grade inflation has, after all, eroded the signaling value of a strong high-school transcript: More than 25 percent of those taking UC San Diego’s remedial math course in 2024 had a 4.0 GPA in high-school math. Students’ weaknesses may not be coming through in other parts of their application. Essays, for example, can be greatly enhanced by artificial intelligence. Without proctored standardized tests, admissions risks becoming ‘a random draw out of a black box,’ which ‘does not serve anybody,’ Aganagic, the Berkeley string theorist, said.”

It seems higher education, like our K-12 system, needs a different way of evaluating readiness and performance. Perhaps returning to the interview system, the way schools made decisions before the SAT, is the solution. Technology could help make an interview system faster and more reliable when it comes to identifying learner talent.

But one thing is certain:

“If you don’t test, whether it be paper and pencil or some type of conversational assessment, then how do you know?”

Til tomorrow. SVB