SAT II offers advantage to minorities, says study

By Shauna Mecartea
Daily Bruin Contributor

Some minorities may have an advantage at standardized testing,
according to David Benjamin, founder and owner of Ahead of the
Class, a private education company based in Orange County.

“The SAT II is not a perfect test, it hasn’t really
been studied before,” Benjamin said.

The SAT II offers the student a choice of tests in writing, math
and other variable subjects. In studies stirred by UC President
Richard Atkinson’s recent proposal to eliminate the SAT I,
Benjamin found that the test favors students who are native
speakers of a language other than English.

Latinos taking the Spanish test scored substantially higher than
Latinos who chose to take a different student choice section, said
Wayne Camara, vice president of research at the College Board, a
nonprofit membership organization that administers the SAT and
other tests.

The score differential is similar with Asian, French and German
students taking tests of their respective languages, Benjamin
said.

Nationally, the proportion of Latino students who speak English
as their primary language is 38 percent, while 62 percent of
Latinos either speak English and another language or another
language alone, Camara said.

He added that in California, the percentage of Latinos speaking
English as their primary language is probably even lower than 38
percent.

The environment in which a person is raised affects the rate
languages can be learned, possibly contributing to the fact that
Latinos and other ethnicities score well on their respective
language exams, despite not being fluent in that language, Camara
said.

But Carla Ferri, the UC director of undergraduate admissions,
said admissions officers look comprehensively at each student,
balancing everything.

Jerry Griffin, an admissions counselor at UC Davis disagreed and
said that the SAT II is being overused in the admissions
process.

Because students are scoring so highly on SAT IIs, Griffin said
those with a GPA as low as 2.85-2.95 are being considered for
admission into the UC system when they may not be prepared for
college.

Benjamin said comparing the student choice sections by
percentile may be a better method if the foreign language sections
are to be included, in order to dissolve the bias of the SAT
II.

A score should count the same if a person scored a 585 in
American history and another native Korean speaker scored 736 in
Korean since both are in the 50th percentile, Benjamin said.

“The UC schools should (also) specify which Math, level I
or II, that students should take. This way there will be a standard
by which all students can be compared,” Benjamin said.

Many measures should be used to determine admission ““ the
more information on students the better, Camara said.