To the editor: I’m more impressed by the author’s wisdom in youth than the op-ed’s many nuanced arguments (“UC should go back to considering standardized tests in admissions,” Dec. 14).
Having worked as a tutor at the Academic Resources Center at UCLA in the early 1980s, my then-supervisor said to me in an after-work chat: “I agree that if students have no such prerequisite skills they shouldn’t be admitted. But think about it this way: This is a state school. If underprepared students are always rejected outright, how much money would we lose?”
Decades went by but this startling revelation, shared when I was an 18-year-old second-year college student, stayed with me. But what about this? Not too long ago, I read about a young man with nearly perfect SAT scores who was rejected from 16 universities, including five University of California campuses. Later hired by Google in a software engineering position, he is now suing some of the universities for anti-Asian discrimination.
Any numeric representation of human ability will invite endless debates. Having a high score is no grounds for guaranteed admission, and a low score does not always lead to a closed door. So many other factors are at play.
Mathilde Diaz, Long Island City, N.Y.
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To the editor: I completely agree with guest contributor William Liang. With the onset of COVID and more remote schooling, in-person attendance and overall learning has been severely reduced, two of my neighbors (both teachers) tell me.
Reintroducing the SAT to the UC system will not help those who have not attended classes over the past few years, but it will help identify those who lack the ability to do a simple math problem.
Michael Newton, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Setting aside the broader arguments for and against standardized tests as a requirement for admission to the UC system, it is clear to me, as a longtime public school educator, that something was seriously wrong with the remedial math assessments given to these students. The sample questions cited by the author involve basic arithmetic concepts introduced in kindergarten and reinforced by fourth grade.
Solving for x in the example provided is so elementary that it requires minimal prior instruction — certainly not beyond what would be expected of a high school graduate, let alone a university student. Before drawing sweeping conclusions, we should first examine the actual test and judge it for ourselves.
Jeff Felz, Los Angeles
