As the Fourth of July weekend drew to a close, the New York Times editorial board published an essay with a straightforward request: that the University of California system bring back its standardized testing requirement for its prospective applicants.
When institutions like MIT and Dartmouth gradually reinstated their testing requirements after the pandemic pause, their rationales generally resembled the arguments that the UC Academic Senate’s Standardized Testing Task Force made in its 2020 report urging the system not to abandon the testing requirement: test scores were better predictors of success for first generation, low-income, and minority students, and grade inflation, along wide variation in grading standards across the state, rendered high school GPA less predictive of college success than it had been in previous years,
Grade inflation is not a new topic for this newsletter. In 2022, we looked that the latest NAEP High School Transcript study, which found that while high schoolers’ GPAs had increased and they were taking more advanced courses, their NAEP scores had flatlined or declined. We also looked at an ACT study that same year, which found that the share of students earning As rose 15 points, from 40% to 55%, from 2010 to 2021, while ACT scores did not increase. Two years later, studies from the American Institutes for Research and The Brookings Institution found similar results. The relationship between grades and test scores had become more tenuous in the wake of the pandemic.
The NYT editorial board is not alone in making its request. Over 3,000 members of the UC faculty have signed one of two letters, one from STEM faculty and one from the humanities, asking the university reinstate its testing requirement. In their letter, the UC humanities faculty write that “it is unreasonable to require all undergraduate degree programs at all campuses to be test-blind in an era of K-12 grade inflation and the growing use of AI in admissions essays.”
The NYT editorial board’s call for the UC system to reinstate its testing requirement was a contrast with another piece published two weeks earlier in the NYT opinion pages. In his essay, Ross Weiner comes out against the test-based accountability reforms of No Child Left Behind that he had once championed, arguing that we should not distill all of what it means to be academically successful to just a few test scores. “I still remember when I first encountered research showing that high school G.P.A. predicted college graduation better than standardized test scores,” he writes. “If so, I recall thinking, why are we fighting so hard for test scores to be the arbiter of quality education?”
There is a large body of research looking at this question. But as the UC humanities professors note, AI adds a new wrinkle to the grade inflation dynamic. If the proliferation of AI makes it increasingly difficult to ensure student work is actually student work — whether in the classroom or on the college essay — what metrics are left to help admissions counselors ensure they are being fair in making the difficult decisions about who will be most likely to succeed at their school? A test score, whether from the SAT or the state standardized tests of the NCLB era, may not tell us everything about what a student knows and can do. But they are an incredibly important part of the overall picture.
