Thursday, January 23, 1997
OPINION:
Students not meeting minimum score requirements do not belong in
universitiesI read an article the other day. You probably didn’t
see it; I only happened on it by chance. After all, it wasn’t
exactly front page news. Hell, it wasn’t even front page of the
sports section news.
But its effects could be.
You see, the article was about a lawsuit against the NCAA over
freshman eligibility requirements.
"The use of the standardized test score with a rigid cutoff
score discriminates and is not justified," Bob Scaeffer of the
National Center for Fair and Open Testing (NCFOT) told the Scripps
Howard News Service.
According to the Scripps Howard News Service (the kind people
who put out the article), the NCFOT (a Cambridge, Mass. group)
initiated the class-action lawsuit several weeks ago on the grounds
of racial discrimination against student athletes and called for
the invalidation of the freshman eligibility requirements.
The basis of the suit, according to the NCFOT, is the claim that
standardized tests are racially biased.
According to Tai Kwon Cureton, one of the plaintiffs named in
the suit, the rule popularly known as Proposition 48 robbed him of
a scholarship and denied him a chance to compete against the best
college track athletes. Cureton claims numerous Division I schools
offered him scholarships, but withdrew their offers when he failed
to score high enough on the SAT.
Tai, buddy, I know where you’re coming from; the same thing
happened to me. I received applications from Harvard and Yale, but
as soon as they saw my grades and SAT, they dropped me like bad
habit.
Sure, I was disappointed, but you didn’t see me suing the Ivy
League. Why? Because I understood that the reason I didn’t get in
is that I wasn’t qualified. It’s just that simple.
"The purpose of the standards is not to discriminate, but to
protect athletes from exploitation," Kathryn Reith, NCAA director
of public information, told Scripps Howard. "They grew out of the
concerns of the 1970s when athletes were brought in (to school)
without any chance of succeeding (academically)."
For those of you who don’t know, the minimum requirements at the
center of all this hubbub are a GPA of 2.5 and an SAT score of 820
for freshmen at Division I colleges. However, a sliding scale
allows for a lower GPA (down to a 2.0) if the student’s SAT score
is higher.
To put that into perspective, the Educational Testing Service
(the body that administers the SAT) reports that the average SAT
score for all college-bound high school seniors in 1995
was1010.
In other words, our man Tai lost his scholarship offers because
he couldn’t come up with a score almost 200 points lower than the
national average. And, don’t forget, everyone taking the SAT has an
absolute minimum score of 400 as long as they fill out their name
correctly.
If you can’t come up with a combination of a C+ average and an
SAT score well below the national average, do you really belong in
college? If you couldn’t succeed academically in high school, can
you expect to succeed in college?
Probably not.
And, contrary to Tai’s claims, the central purpose of colleges
is to provide a college education, not to provide an opportunity to
compete against high caliber athletes. If you aren’t qualified to
succeed academically in college, then you simply don’t belong
there.
But what of the NCFOT’s claim about racial discrimination in
standardized tests?
Honestly, I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of
sociology and standardized testing to give an authoritative answer
on the subject, but I personally don’t buy the ‘racial bias’
argument. There may be an economic bias, given that wealthy
students can pay for review courses, and it’s true that a
disproportionate number of blacks are unable to afford such
courses. But that doesn’t constitute racial discrimination. It
sucks, but it’s a fact that we have to come to terms with: rich
people will always be able to afford things that we poor folk
can’t. No matter how the tests are organized, someone will design a
review course for it, and those who can afford it will have an
unfair advantage over the rest of us.
Nevertheless, there needs to be some kind of standardized test
for colleges to judge applicants with. Anyone who has ever been a
student knows that every teacher varies in difficulty; some give
almost all As, while others give out 25 Cs. So just imagine how
much variety there is from high school to high school. With
thousands of high schools in California alone, it would be
impossible for colleges to know how one student’s 3.29 GPA compares
to another’s 3.81.
The answer is standardized tests.
Sorry Tai.
Rob Kariakin