NYT: Faculty Panel at Cal Faults Way to Pick Merit Scholars

[DeepModem Mom]

Faculty Panel at Cal Faults Way to Pick Merit Scholars
By KAREN W. ARENSON
Published: March 22, 2005


A faculty committee at the University of California says that the way the National Merit Scholarship Program chooses winners is unfair and that its practice of giving scholarships regardless of need is "contrary to U.C. standards and philosophy."

The committee, the Board of Admissions and Relations With Schools, has asked the university's campuses and top officials to reconsider their participation in the program.

The panel's chairman, Michael T. Brown, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said yesterday that "a number of campuses have said they are definitely reconsidering."

Eligibility for merit scholarships is determined solely by scores on the Preliminary SAT exam, formally the PSAT/NMSQT. Of more than 1.3 million 11th-grade students who take the exam each year, about 16,000 are chosen as Merit semifinalists. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a nonprofit company in Evanston, Ill., then uses student essays, high school records, recommendations from school principals and scores from a second test, the SAT, to reduce the pool to 15,000 finalists....

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"Only a small proportion of African-Americans and Latinos are among the highest scorers on the PSAT exam," said Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, a group that opposes heavy reliance on standardized testing....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/22/education/22merit.html