The secret reason UT adopted standardized tests

• The standardized test mandate was scrapped in 2021, amid national concerns over bias in standardized testing.
• Officially, the university dropped the testing requirement to ensure that testing limitations related to the COVID-19 pandemic did not affect a student's ability to apply.

The big picture: UT's decision to make SATs optional suggests how far the university has come.

Flashback: After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required schools and universities to integrate, University of Texas regents and segregationist politicians plotted to find ways to keep Black students from entering undergraduate classrooms.

• Less than two weeks after the Brown ruling, in May 1954, H. Y. McCown, the university's admissions dean, wrote to university president Logan Wilson to figure out ways to "keep Negroes out of most classes where there are a large number of girls."

What they did: University administrators adopted a selective admissions policy based around standardized testing, which they calculated would suppress the number of Black students they were forced to admit.

Details: In June 1955, the Committee on Selective Admissions, composed of faculty and administrators, noted in a confidential memo that if the 2,700-person freshman class was admitted according to state population proportions, 300 would be black, per reporting by Asher several years ago for a book about desegregation and football at UT.

• And the memo noted that white UT freshmen had significantly higher aptitude-test scores than incoming freshmen at three Texas black colleges.

• A standardized-test cutoff "point of 72 would eliminate about 10% of UT freshmen and about 74% of Negroes," the committee stated in a footnote. "Assuming the distributions are representative, this cutting point would tend to result in a maximum of 70 Negroes in a class of 2,700."

The bottom line: The following month, in July 1955, the regents issued a public statement that new admissions standards based on testing would be imposed in time for the 1956-1957 school year because UT was expecting "many more applications for admission on the undergraduate level than can be adequately accommodated."