A Familiar Controversy

This debate is so familiar it’s almost not interesting any more. Almost.

The argument has been made for years that standardized tests discriminate against (among others) students from poorer schools in rural areas. Responding to these arguments, several universites reformed their admissions criteria, dropping the standardized test and relying instead on high school grades and exit exam scores. They found, however, that the change did not increase the number of untraditional students, and recently those changes have been rescinded and the older admissions criteria reinstated.

The result was predictable: accusations of racism, resegregation, etc. There is, however, an unfamilar twist to this tale: this controversy, as described by an article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, has erupted in Israel.

Until this year, students applying to most undergraduate programs at public universities here were required to submit two numbers. The first was the bagrut grade, a combination of scores on Israel’s nationwide high-school-graduation exam and the high-school report card. The second was the score on the “psychometric exam,” a standardized test similar to the SAT. In most cases, students are admitted solely on the basis of those scores. Israeli universities generally do not consider nonacademic criteria, such as personal interviews or extracurricular activities.

The psychometric exam, which was made optional this year, has long been criticized as discriminatory against applicants from the country’s disadvantaged and outlying areas, where schools are often not good and cultural norms are different. In the disadvantaged neighborhoods and peripheral regions, non-Western populations predominate — Arab citizens of Israel and Oriental Jews, whose families emigrated from the Muslim world.

The problem is that the reform resulted in the admission of many more Arabs but no more students from the targeted outlying areas.

The controversy erupted when Edi Keren, admissions director at Tel Aviv University, told an Israeli journalist that 52 percent of the students accepted this year into the university’s dental school were Arabs, compared with 29 percent last year. She saw similar jumps in the percentage of Arab students accepted in other medical fields, like nursing and occupational therapy. However, the percentage of Jewish students from outlying regions remained about the same.

“The new system primarily benefited Arab students,” Ms. Keren confirmed to The Chronicle. “But the goal of the reform was to increase the number of students from the country’s periphery.”

Critics, of course, call the decision to rescind the reforms racist. Khulood Badawi, a graduate student at the University of Haifa and an aide to a member of the Knesset from the largely Arab Hadash faction, said “[t]he decision is racist and was made in order to reduce the number of Arabs at the universities.” Defenders of the return to the old standards disagree, arguing that the psychometric exam has been proved to be a much better predictor of college performance.

“The truth is that we at Hebrew University had decided to abandon the reform even before the universities made their joint decision,” said Menachem Magidor, president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He opted to revoke the change, he said, after seeing preliminary figures on the qualifications of students accepted this year.

“There were very suspicious discrepancies,” he said, “between test scores and high-school grades.”

….

“Both the psychometric exam and the bagrut exams are culturally dependent and affected by the quality of one’s high school and the nature of one’s cultural surroundings, … but the psychometric exam’s cultural dependence is much lower than that of the bagrut.”

As I say, this debate sounds all too familiar. But there is one aspect of it that is positively un-American:

Other universities said that they could not know how the new system had affected Arab applicants. Since most Israeli universities collect only geographic, not ethnic, data on their students, they could confirm only that the new system had not benefited applicants from outside major population centers.

Say What?