Those are the two implications of a new report from the University of California system, first noted by the Los Angeles Times.
The document supports the continued use of standardized tests and demolishes the case against them for the zillionth time. Yes, the tests predict important college outcomes such as grades and graduation. No, they are not redundant with high-school grades; the two measure different things and complement each other when predicting outcomes. (Standardized tests score everyone on the exact same scale, while grades pick up some things that tests don’t so much, such as work ethic.) No, tests aren’t just a proxy for race and class; they continue to predict outcomes within demographic categories.
As for affirmation action, well, California has banned it — and the report shows how brazenly schools will still try to racially engineer their classes. The report’s authors “weighed both the importance of admitting students most likely to succeed at UC and the importance of enrolling classes representative of California’s diversity.” They recommend expanding a program that automatically “admits students in the top 9% of each school based on [GPA] alone,” no matter the individual’s test scores, which “would send a signal to Californians about the high value that UC places on becoming more representative of the state over time.” That’s an interesting goal in a state whose voters banned racial preferences. As I’ve noted before, the difficulty of forcing compliance with affirmative-actions bans is important to bear in mind as we hope for the new Supreme Court to strike down the practice.
(And for the record, I wrote this before seeing Jim Geraghty’s more critical take on standardized tests above.)