San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Starting in fall 2006, University of California campuses no longer will award National Merit Scholarships because the program relies exclusively on a high-stakes standardized test to determine students’ academic merit, university officials announced Wednesday.

The move is expected to affect hundreds of students whose performance as juniors on the PSAT, a precursor to the SAT college entrance exam, determines whether they are eligible for the National Merit program. The test is used as a first cut to eliminate about 99 percent of the more than 1 million students who take it each year.

The University of California campuses will continue awarding scholarships to National Merit students to whom it already has promised awards. It had about 600 of them last year and they received about $735,000 in scholarships.

The decision by chancellors of the six University of California campuses to drop out of the prestigious program follows a recommendation by the Academic Council, the faculty’s executive body, to stop awarding scholarships and admissions preferences to National Merit winners.

The faculty body rejected the program saying that using only one test, which has no demonstrated ability to predict college success, is inconsistent with how the University of California defines merit.

“We believe we have better standards for measuring academic merit,” said University of California Santa Cruz astronomy professor George Blumenthal, Academic Senate chairman.

Those standards include using grades, test scores and a broad array of other factors that make up a student’s entire academic record.

University of California Berkeley and Riverside did not participate in the National Merit program. The newest campus, Merced, decided not to take part in advance of its opening this fall.

“We honor and respect academic achievement, and we are very proud to have many National Merit scholars apply to the University of California,” said Provost M.R.C. Greenwood. “The decision is not meant to diminish those students or their accomplishments in any way. This is an issue of ensuring that when the university uses its own resources to fund merit-based scholarships, it does so in a way that is consistent with its own policies.”

In fact, said Blumenthal, many National Merit scholars would be eligible for university’s own merit awards, Regents Scholarships and Chancellor’s Scholarships.

—

(c) 2005, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

Visit Mercury Center, the World Wide Web site of the Mercury News, at http://www.sjmercury.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-07-13-05 2034EDT

Copy the Story Link