Wednesday 16 January 2013
Dartmouth eliminates AP credits. Bad move.
Vox Clamantis
Too Broad a Brush
To the Editor:
The College’s new policy to stop granting credits
for Advanced Placement courses is disappointing
(“Registrar to restrict AP, IB credits,” Jan. 9).
The AP program is a series of 34 introductory
college-level courses and exams that students can
take in high school for which they may receive
college credit and the courses are vetted by college
professors throughout the country. College
students, taking equivalent subjects, field test the
AP exams and their scores are compared with
their end-of-course grades.
AP exams are graded each year by college
professors working in concert with high school
teachers. AP course materials are college-level.
For example, the textbook I used to teach AP
psychology was the best-selling textbook in both
the AP and college markets. High school teachers
typically attend training workshops during
the summer to help ensure that they have the
necessary skills to teach AP classes.
Not only is Dartmouth’s new policy likely to
cost the school hundreds of applicants who will
instead attend colleges that grant AP credit, but
it will also drag down Dartmouth students who
are forced to repeat introductory subject material
they have already mastered.
Dartmouth and other schools should certainly
examine AP critically and regularly to ensure
standards — the College Board makes recommendations,
but it is the duty of individual departments
at various colleges and universities to make
sure that a particular AP class is equivalent to
an introductory course they offer. The problem
with Dartmouth’s new policy is that it paints with
too broad a brush. While particular AP courses
undoubtedly will not fit individual department requirements,
many will. The faculty should revisit
this issue after the various departments have had
a chance to review individual AP courses, syllabi
and exams.
Patrick Mattimore ’72
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Friday 29 May 2009
Thursday 14 May 2009
Tuesday 12 May 2009
Now a SF Examiner
I'm now writing for the SF Examiner as an International Living Examiner. Here's a link.
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-10851-SF-International-Living-Examiner~y2009m5d12-Walking-Duke-the-dog-in-France
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-10851-SF-International-Living-Examiner~y2009m5d12-Walking-Duke-the-dog-in-France
Friday 4 July 2008
SAT Subject tests
Here's a piece I wrote that will be in the Los Angeles Daily Journal (Ca's primary legal newspaper next week). It's one of those issues which I think is a big deal b/c it will make a substantive change in UC admissions (IMHO for the worse). Been tough to get anybody to care about it though.
I will be going to India for some vacation and training of Indian lawyers next week. Will be there for 3 weeks.Probably won't get to this blog much.
A Bad Change in UC Admissions' Policy
The University of California Academic Assembly, a group which represents UC faculty, has recommended that UC’s Board of Regents change current admissions policies at its nine undergraduate UC campuses. The faculty proposal will be considered by the Regents in July.
Currently, undergraduate applicants to any of the University of California’s undergraduate campuses are required to submit either a standardized ACT or an SAT Reasoning test result, and two SAT Subject tests. The Academic Assembly has proposed ending the requirement that students take the Subject tests. Applicants would still be required to take either the ACT (including the writing test) or the SAT Reasoning test.
On its face, the Faculty proposal is a common sense suggestion to ease roadblocks for underrepresented minority applicants who, while otherwise eligible to apply to UC schools, fail to meet the Subject test requirement. Dr. Ana-Christina Ramon, research coordinator for the University of California, Los Angeles’ Ralph J. Bunche Center is quoted in the magazine “Diverse Issues in Higher Education” about the recommendation. Ramon said: “Research has found that minority students are less likely to take the SAT subject tests. It’s an additional test and many minority students don’t always have the opportunity to take the test or even recognize that it’s necessary.”
The problem is that the Subject tests are often the best yardstick that admissions’ evaluators have to predict how students will fare once they get to college. Rather than eliminate Subject tests, UC should work with high schools to make sure that qualified students understand the need, and have the chance, to take those tests.
When the faculty proposal first surfaced in March, the Los Angeles Times reported that “(S)ome UC professors privately wondered whether the proposed change was a way around California’s Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative passed by voters in 1996.”
That concern is well-founded.
Cases involving challenges to university affirmative action admissions’ policies have reached the Supreme Court three times, in the cases of DeFunis, Baake, and Gratz/Grutter. In the Defunis case, the Court ruled that the issue of DeFunis’ admission to the University of Washington law school was moot but in both the Baake and Gratz/Grutter cases the Supreme Court affirmed the principle of a public university’s right to consider a person’s race as one factor in the college’s admission decision.
However, in each state in which the Court has considered the issue of race and admissions (Washington, California, and Michigan), voters subsequently passed anti-affirmative action laws prohibiting their public universities from using race as a factor in admissions.
Michael Brown, Chair of the UC Systemwide Academic Senate, defended the Faculty proposal, telling the Los Angeles Times that most faculty were convinced that the subject test requirement was “cutting people out of at least a shot of consideration for no reasons that have to do with achievement.” Brown suggested that the current subject tests limit UC’s ability to bring in as diverse a class as possible.
But at the least selective UC campuses, the fear is that the faculty proposal will open the door to a lower-calibre of student. In a letter to Brown expressing why UC Riverside could not support the faculty recommendation, Thomas Cogswell, Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate, wrote that without a clear and compelling reason to change the current admission’s policy, UC Riverside faculty opposed replacing a bright line with a broad grey zone that would cause admissions staff at Riverside to dip lower into the applicant pool.
The broad grey zone is otherwise known as “comprehensive review,” a policy approved by the Regents in 2001 which allows admissions officials to look beyond just an applicant’s grade point average and test scores.
The Faculty proposal, in addition to eliminating the Subject test requirement, will open more applications to a comprehensive review. UC’s comprehensive review policy came under attack several years ago when then Chairman of the UC Board of Regents, John Moores, examined evidence from 2002 and concluded that Berkeley was admitting low-scoring (based on SAT scores) blacks and Hispanics at twice the rate of similarly scoring Asians and whites. In 2004, A UC review panel came to a similar conclusion based upon their analysis of the entire UC system.
It is hardly a stretch to suggest that by eliminating the objectivity of the SAT Subject tests, admission’s officials will be suspected of playing favored race cards.
Responding to the proposed UC policy change, Dean of Admissions at Harvard University, William Fitzsimmons told a reporter from the Harvard Crimson that his University’s internal studies have proven the efficacy of Subject test scores to predict academic success at Harvard. Fitzsimmons said, the Subject tests “have been better predictors than either high school grades or the SAT (Reasoning Test).”
When UC policy makers evaluated the University’s standardized test requirements several years ago, they found that Subject tests were the best single predictor of freshman grades (better than high school grade point average or the SAT Reasoning test) based upon UC data compiled over a four-year period. Subsequent UC research has concluded that the Subject tests are better predictors of overall academic performance in college than the Reasoning test.
The Faculty recommendation is especially perplexing in that the Committee previously urged the University to place twice as much weight on the Subject tests as upon the Reasoning test and, before the College Board made minor changes to that test, suggested the University eliminate consideration of the Reasoning test altogether.
A UC commissioned report issued five years ago concluded that the Subject tests offered the University a number of advantages over the Reasoning test. The report urged “that the University seeks to measure mastery of the content of the high school curriculum, that using scores from appropriate admissions tests to complement high school grades increases our ability to achieve this goal, and that achievement exams are more suited to measuring mastery of the high school curriculum than exams designed to measure general intellectual aptitude. Moreover, achievement tests provide information that students and their families can use to prepare for college and that schools can use to evaluate and improve their own programs.”
Six of the nine University of California schools are ranked within the top fifty colleges in the 2008 U S News & World Report list of top national universities. In order to remain competitive with the other top schools, UC should not water down its admission requirements.
The University of California seeks a laudable goal of insuring that the state’s colleges will be available to a wide spectrum of students. Given that colleges have just completed the most competitive admission’s cycle in our country’s history, with no letup foreseen for at least the next several years, it is no small task to provide access to many capable students. Surely, though, the answer is not to throw away a merit-based opportunity for students to demonstrate competency.
I will be going to India for some vacation and training of Indian lawyers next week. Will be there for 3 weeks.Probably won't get to this blog much.
A Bad Change in UC Admissions' Policy
The University of California Academic Assembly, a group which represents UC faculty, has recommended that UC’s Board of Regents change current admissions policies at its nine undergraduate UC campuses. The faculty proposal will be considered by the Regents in July.
Currently, undergraduate applicants to any of the University of California’s undergraduate campuses are required to submit either a standardized ACT or an SAT Reasoning test result, and two SAT Subject tests. The Academic Assembly has proposed ending the requirement that students take the Subject tests. Applicants would still be required to take either the ACT (including the writing test) or the SAT Reasoning test.
On its face, the Faculty proposal is a common sense suggestion to ease roadblocks for underrepresented minority applicants who, while otherwise eligible to apply to UC schools, fail to meet the Subject test requirement. Dr. Ana-Christina Ramon, research coordinator for the University of California, Los Angeles’ Ralph J. Bunche Center is quoted in the magazine “Diverse Issues in Higher Education” about the recommendation. Ramon said: “Research has found that minority students are less likely to take the SAT subject tests. It’s an additional test and many minority students don’t always have the opportunity to take the test or even recognize that it’s necessary.”
The problem is that the Subject tests are often the best yardstick that admissions’ evaluators have to predict how students will fare once they get to college. Rather than eliminate Subject tests, UC should work with high schools to make sure that qualified students understand the need, and have the chance, to take those tests.
When the faculty proposal first surfaced in March, the Los Angeles Times reported that “(S)ome UC professors privately wondered whether the proposed change was a way around California’s Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative passed by voters in 1996.”
That concern is well-founded.
Cases involving challenges to university affirmative action admissions’ policies have reached the Supreme Court three times, in the cases of DeFunis, Baake, and Gratz/Grutter. In the Defunis case, the Court ruled that the issue of DeFunis’ admission to the University of Washington law school was moot but in both the Baake and Gratz/Grutter cases the Supreme Court affirmed the principle of a public university’s right to consider a person’s race as one factor in the college’s admission decision.
However, in each state in which the Court has considered the issue of race and admissions (Washington, California, and Michigan), voters subsequently passed anti-affirmative action laws prohibiting their public universities from using race as a factor in admissions.
Michael Brown, Chair of the UC Systemwide Academic Senate, defended the Faculty proposal, telling the Los Angeles Times that most faculty were convinced that the subject test requirement was “cutting people out of at least a shot of consideration for no reasons that have to do with achievement.” Brown suggested that the current subject tests limit UC’s ability to bring in as diverse a class as possible.
But at the least selective UC campuses, the fear is that the faculty proposal will open the door to a lower-calibre of student. In a letter to Brown expressing why UC Riverside could not support the faculty recommendation, Thomas Cogswell, Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate, wrote that without a clear and compelling reason to change the current admission’s policy, UC Riverside faculty opposed replacing a bright line with a broad grey zone that would cause admissions staff at Riverside to dip lower into the applicant pool.
The broad grey zone is otherwise known as “comprehensive review,” a policy approved by the Regents in 2001 which allows admissions officials to look beyond just an applicant’s grade point average and test scores.
The Faculty proposal, in addition to eliminating the Subject test requirement, will open more applications to a comprehensive review. UC’s comprehensive review policy came under attack several years ago when then Chairman of the UC Board of Regents, John Moores, examined evidence from 2002 and concluded that Berkeley was admitting low-scoring (based on SAT scores) blacks and Hispanics at twice the rate of similarly scoring Asians and whites. In 2004, A UC review panel came to a similar conclusion based upon their analysis of the entire UC system.
It is hardly a stretch to suggest that by eliminating the objectivity of the SAT Subject tests, admission’s officials will be suspected of playing favored race cards.
Responding to the proposed UC policy change, Dean of Admissions at Harvard University, William Fitzsimmons told a reporter from the Harvard Crimson that his University’s internal studies have proven the efficacy of Subject test scores to predict academic success at Harvard. Fitzsimmons said, the Subject tests “have been better predictors than either high school grades or the SAT (Reasoning Test).”
When UC policy makers evaluated the University’s standardized test requirements several years ago, they found that Subject tests were the best single predictor of freshman grades (better than high school grade point average or the SAT Reasoning test) based upon UC data compiled over a four-year period. Subsequent UC research has concluded that the Subject tests are better predictors of overall academic performance in college than the Reasoning test.
The Faculty recommendation is especially perplexing in that the Committee previously urged the University to place twice as much weight on the Subject tests as upon the Reasoning test and, before the College Board made minor changes to that test, suggested the University eliminate consideration of the Reasoning test altogether.
A UC commissioned report issued five years ago concluded that the Subject tests offered the University a number of advantages over the Reasoning test. The report urged “that the University seeks to measure mastery of the content of the high school curriculum, that using scores from appropriate admissions tests to complement high school grades increases our ability to achieve this goal, and that achievement exams are more suited to measuring mastery of the high school curriculum than exams designed to measure general intellectual aptitude. Moreover, achievement tests provide information that students and their families can use to prepare for college and that schools can use to evaluate and improve their own programs.”
Six of the nine University of California schools are ranked within the top fifty colleges in the 2008 U S News & World Report list of top national universities. In order to remain competitive with the other top schools, UC should not water down its admission requirements.
The University of California seeks a laudable goal of insuring that the state’s colleges will be available to a wide spectrum of students. Given that colleges have just completed the most competitive admission’s cycle in our country’s history, with no letup foreseen for at least the next several years, it is no small task to provide access to many capable students. Surely, though, the answer is not to throw away a merit-based opportunity for students to demonstrate competency.
Sunday 29 June 2008
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