Graduate schools place varying degrees of emphasis on tests

By Scott Street Daily Bruin Senior Staff While graduate-level
entrance exams like the LSAT, MCAT and GRE haven’t faced the
same amount of criticism the SAT has in recent years, some
administrators say those tests are becoming less important to
students’ admission hopes. “In the distant past, many
admissions committees took the MCAT and GPA as prominent
decision-makers,” said Dr. Neil Parker, senior associate dean
of student affairs and graduate medical education in the UCLA
School of Medicine. “There is a lower degree of importance
now.” But try telling that to a student taking the upcoming
LSAT, GRE or MCAT. No matter what administrators think, many
students feel admissions decisions hinge on these scores.
“From what I hear, it’s a good indicator of whether
you’ll be successful or not,” said Michael Grossman, a
fourth-year business economics student and president of the UCLA
Pre-Law Society. Grossman also said that most of the law schools
hosted by the Pre-Law Society have said that the LSAT counts for
roughly one-third of the admissions criteria, the same as GPA.
“I’m under the impression that it does mean a
lot,” Grossman added. “It will either get you over the
hump or kill you.” Robert Schaeffer, Public Education
Director of Fair Test: The National Center for Fair and Open
Testing, agreed that while administrators say standardized tests
have dropped in importance in admissions, they still send students
the message that they better do well on them. “It is
certainly true that most departments still post score
requirements,” Schaeffer said, “A lot of places are
de-emphasizing (them), but both the LSAT and GMAT are required by
their accrediting bodies.” Administrators at UCLA, though,
said standardized tests are required so that academics still do
matter in admission ““ even if it’s not as much as in
the past. “In general it is very significant,” said
Michael Rappaport, assistant dean of admissions and special
programs in the UCLA School of Law. “I think (law) schools
tend to rely more heavily on the LSAT, but we don’t want to
overweigh it. We don’t want to minimize grades.” At
UCLA, the same goes for graduate programs ranging from engineering
to English. In fact, only six out of the College of Letters &
Science’s 103 graduate programs don’t require some sort
of standardized test. That’s not to say, however, that a
standardized test can make or break your chances for admission at
UCLA, according to Stephen E. Jacobsen, associate dean of academic
and student affairs in the School of Engineering and Applied
Science, which requires its applicants to submit GRE scores.
“In addition to the statements of purpose and performance in
courses directly related to their specific field, the GREs are used
in a tertiary way, and are generally used to weed out students
whose mathematical and analytic scores are far below the
norm,” Jacobsen said. But outside of UCLA, there are a
growing number of programs that don’t require standardized
tests, and they say the quality of their applicants hasn’t
diminished. “To me they are valuable, but I see more and more
people not believing in them,” said Chake Kouyoumjian,
director of graduate admissions at Loyola Marymount University,
whose engineering program has no test requirement. “It
shouldn’t be a criterion for judging students.”
“You can see that the trend will continue,” she added.
“The focus is not to be much on standardized tests.”
That “trend” has developed amidst a nationwide debate
about the validity of standardized test scores ““ if they are
fair and what skills or knowledge they test. No test has been
spared, from the LSAT to the GRE, which Schaeffer said has come
under some of the harshest criticism. “A lot of studies
predict that the test doesn’t predict much of anything at
all,” Schaeffer said referring to the GRE. “It is
biased against females, older (out-of-college) students and African
Americans and Latinos.” But test directors say that criticism
has helped their tests become stronger. According to Ed Haggerty, a
media relations specialist with the Law School Admissions Council,
which administers the LSAT, the test is constantly rewritten and
pre-tested. And in response to criticisms of a cultural bias, test
directors are quick to point out the requirements each question
must meet before it makes it into a test booklet. “We have
several processes to ensure fairness,” said Ellen Julian,
director of the MCAT. “We do analyses of potential item bias
every time the test is administered.” That effort is
something both standardized test proponents and opponents praise,
though Schaeffer said that more has to be done to erase bias that
test writers may not catch. “There has been a near-total
elimination of items that are superficially biased,”
Schaeffer said. “But that kind of review doesn’t get at
some of the other types of bias inherent in these exams that reward
a particular type of style that is word-associated with males and
whites.” While some say that graduate-level standardized
tests still have a long way to go before they erase any bias, the
rewriting process hasn’t made the exams any easier, and
students say that is why they take them so seriously. “It was
definitely the hardest test I ever took ““ harder than
anything I took at UCLA,” Madhav Boddula, a 1999 UCLA
graduate and current medical school applicant, said of the MCAT.
“Especially with the anxiety leading up to it and knowing how
important it was for my career.” Administrators acknowledge
that fact. They also say the tests will continue to be used if only
because they are the only equal ground on which to measure
candidates who come from a wide range of American and international
universities. “You can say that the test is a great equalizer
for people who do really well, if they didn’t do well
before,” Rappaport said. Ultimately, Parker added, admissions
decisions come down to an evaluation of the applicant as a whole
““ taking GPA, test scores, recommendations and background
into consideration. “The person is often the deciding factor
because the scores we’re looking at are often very
similar,” he said.

TESTING STANDARDS Though studies show that SAT
scores have maintained a steady level or gone down in the last
decade, scores on some graduate level tests, including the MCAT,
have gone up. A look at average MCAT scores of matriculating
medical students over the past 8 years: Entering Year Verbal
Reasoning Physical Sciences Biological Sciences 1992 9.2 9.2 9.3
1993 9.4 9.3 9.5 1994 9.4 9.4 9.6 1995 9.5 9.7 9.8 1996 9.6 9.8
10.0 1997 9.6 9.8 10.1 1998 9.5 9.9 10.2 1999 9.5 10.0 10.2 SOURCE:
American Association of Medical Colleges Original graphic by MAGGIE
WOO Web adaptation by ALICE HOM/Daily Bruin