Challenges to SAT Are Cited as Way to Fight Bans on Race-Conscious Admissions

The Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog
June 17, 2009

A prominent civil-rights lawyer has suggested in a recently published analysis that the next legal challenges to state bans on public colleges’ use of race-conscious admissions policies could come in the form of attacks on the institutions’ reliance on the SAT.
In an article published in the latest issue of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Kimberly West-Faulcon, a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and former western regional director for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, argues that federal law actually requires public colleges to disregard state bans on their consideration of race in admissions if doing so is necessary to remedy unjustified racial gaps in admissions rates. If it can be shown that public colleges are relying on the SAT more than educationally necessary and such overreliance has the effect of causing them to discriminate against minority applicants, then their use of race-conscious admissions can be seen as a legally justified remedy to the problem, she says.
Ms. West-Faulcon hinges her argument on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which has been interpreted by the U.S. Education Department has prohibiting colleges from using selection criteria that have the effect of discriminating against applicants based on race. Although she stops short of calling the SAT racially discriminatory, she says some public colleges in California and Washington State may be relying on it more than necessary, and that reliance has contributed to racial gaps in their admissions rates in the years since voters in those states adopted bans on the use of racial preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies.

Full Blog: http://chronicle.com/news/article/6656/challenges-to-sat-are-cited-as-way-to-fight-bans-on-race-conscious-admissions?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en