Posted on 03/23/2005 4:00:15 PM PST by SmithL
BERKELEY, Calif. - A University of California faculty committee is challenging the National Merit Scholarship Program, saying the way it uses the PSAT to determine eligibility is unfair.
The committee is asking UC's campuses and systemwide officials to rethink their participation in the program.
Michael T. Brown, committee chairman, said faculty object to the program's reliance on the PSAT, a practice test for the SAT. They're also not happy with the system of using a simple cutoff score to determine eligibility and are concerned the process is unfair to some minority and low-income students.
What UC faculty think about a program can have far-reaching implications. Just this month students across the country took an SAT that had been significantly overhauled following UC objections to the old test.
Elaine Detweiler, a spokeswoman for the Illinois-based National Merit Scholarship Program, defended the selection process.
"We are using the test in a correct manner. The fact that it is a competition - there has to be a cutoff score at some point," Detweiler said.
More than a million high school juniors take the PSAT, formally known as the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholar Qualifying Test, every year. About 50,000 students move on to the next level based on scores. From there, other criteria such as student essays, high school records and letters of recommendation are used to choose winners.
The National Merit Scholarship Program, initiated in 1955, is an independent organization which cosponsors the PSAT/NMSQT with The College Board, the nonprofit group that owns the SAT.
College Board trustees were scheduled to get a status update from a subcommittee studying the PSAT and merit scholarships at their meeting in New York on Thursday.
Questions about the PSAT's role in the merit program were raised by Patrick Hayashi, a retired UC administrator and former College Board trustee, who took his concerns to both the board and UC faculty.
Hayashi said there's no evidence the PSAT is the right way to determine eligibility for the scholarships. He also said it goes against accepted practice to depend so heavily on a test score.
"For 50 years it's (the program) been the hallmark of excellence. But if you look at it for 50 seconds - I don't think a single educator would agree with the way they establish their eligible pool," Hayashi said.
A third concern is the effect of the selection criteria on minority and poor students.
In a March letter to campuses, the UC faculty committee said data on SAT results suggests that the PSAT as used by the merit scholarship program "overwhelmingly favors a narrow group of affluent students attending well-endowed high schools, maximizing rather than minimizing adverse negative impact on disadvantaged students."
College Board officials say their tests are fair and disparities in results indicate problems with the educational system, not their exams.
"Clearly, there's an inequity in the American education system that's reflected in tests and grade points. It's not the fault of the test or grade points," said College Board spokeswoman Chiara Coletti.
Being a National Merit Scholar doesn't help a student get into the UC system, but it may provide a small boost in the secondary selection process, when students try to get into a particular campus.
Six of UC's nine undergraduate campuses participate in the scholarship program but only two consider it as a factor in admissions, a UC spokeswoman said. UC paid for $1.4 million in National Merit Scholarships last year.
They'd be happy with a merit-based test if it tested the student's Leftist socio-political views.
If the University of California at Berkeley regents and policy makers concentrated in academic excellence only, and left their social engineering schemes at home, they'd be doing everyone a favor including themselves.
The National Merit Scholarships should be awarded based on these factors:
1. Queerness.
2. Hatred of America.
3. Support for Democrats.
Then there'd be no more complaints.
"Hayashi said there's no evidence the PSAT is the right way to determine eligibility for the scholarships. He also said it goes against accepted practice to depend so heavily on a test score."
What planet does this guy live on? Today, kids can't get out of high school or advance to the next grade in elementary school unless they pass a "high-stakes" test.
Yes, of course a merit scholarship should be based on one's race or financial status. After all, in today's world race determines merit and entitlements, doesn't it? And minorities and low-income students don't have many other options for grants or scholarships. </sarcasm>
As a white male, I think I qualified to apply for maybe three different scholarships worth between $25 and $50 each.
The NM scholarship is actually pretty small, compared to other scholarships that emphasize other factors. I'm sure the UC paid much more for other scholarships than for the NM winners.
Also, many NM scholarships are paid by companies of the students' parents or other companies, so the UC doesn't pay for all the NM scholarships.
What the article does not explain (typical shoddy journalism) is that PSAT is not used to AWARD the scholarships, but merely to establish an 'eligible' pool of intellectually gifted students from which a much smaller number of winners will be selected based upon grades, etc. The article does mention that the test is used to establish 'eligibility' but does not make clear that the scholarships are not awarded simply upon test scores.
The criterion that SHOULD be disputed is that (at least in the 1970s when I graduated from h.s., and I doubt it's been changed) is that the verbal score was given TWICE the weight of the math score when creating a composite score to determine eligibility - in other words, some edu-bureaucrats had determined that they should greatly discount mathematical abilities relative to verbal abilities in creating the eligibile list for the National Merit scholarships. Can we guess that the usual ed-school twits were involved in creating such a policy?? Why downgrade math prodigies who are not as verbally proficient?? This was probably an early form of political correctness aimed at keeping out of the eligible pool a small number of mathematically gifted students, overwhelmingly male, who are not nearly as verbally gifted (it did not matter to me personally, since my math and verbal scores were very close, but I always thought it was stupid to rule out from such a scholarship the kind of student who had phenomenal mathematical abilities but perhaps only middling verbal abilities, especially since math and science prowess are so terribly important to our society's success and survival).
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