In recent years, the United States’ (U.S.) higher educational system has become increasingly dominated by a focus on standardized testing practices: politicians, pundits, parents, and even educational leaders emphasize test scores--whether from AP exams, SATs, ACTs, or state-mandated tests. However, most schools in Puerto Rico do not even encourage students to take the SAT or ACT, two of the College Board’s most popular and widely accepted standardized tests. Instead, schools on the island have opted to use the Puerto-Rico specific Prueba de Aptitud Académia, or “PAA,” known locally as “el College Board.” Due to the widespread acceptance of the PAA in Puerto Rico, mainland colleges’ obsession with tests like the SAT and ACT comes at the expense of Puerto Rican students who wish to study at universities other than the few options available on the island. Further, the Puerto Rican educational system parallels the rest of the country in a way that is undeniably flawed and continues to be fueled by a long record of colonial violence.
The root of Puerto Rico’s educational crisis goes farther back than Hurricane Maria. In fact, it stems from a 1964 decision by the College Board to expand its market to Latin America with a Spanish-language edition of the college entry exam. The College Entry Examination Board (CEEB) was founded in the late 1800s and has since been working tirelessly to promote a Testing-Based Accountability system in the U.S. This system places emphasis on standardized test scores such as the SAT and ACT as an important predictor of student success. During the early sixties, Puerto Rico became the ideal location for the College Board’s base of operations due to its American-style social and economic infrastructure. When their attempts at drafting a “Spanish SAT” failed to aid U.S. admissions due to the low number of test-takers, the College Board instead decided to implement widespread educational reform throughout Puerto Rico. Shortly after--and with the assistance of the College Board--the PAA was adopted as Puerto Rico’s national college admissions exam, marking the birth of a Puerto Rican education system parallel to that of the mainland U.S. As is evidenced by the increasingly low number of Puerto Rican applicants to elite mainland schools, Puerto Rico’s educational system has inadvertently created a status quo that precludes mainland universities as an option for Puerto Rican high schoolers due to the unequal advantages mainland applicants have by means of standardized testing. The College Board saw an economic opportunity and seized it, with little regard for the impact their decision would have on the development of Puerto Rico. The result has been a severe underrepresentation of Puerto Rican students in higher education, as well as a glaring lack of opportunity and educational mobility as a result of mainland admissions standards.
The average Puerto Rican faces significant hurdles to applying to out-of-state universities, much more than U.S. citizens elsewhere. The biggest driver of this inequity is the United States’ deep-seated commitment to standardized testing practices. Unless educational policymakers address the issue of standardized testing, this disparity will only continue to grow, with an increasing number of students leaving Puerto Rico each year in hopes of achieving higher education due to the crippling economic impact of Hurricane Maria. The University of Puerto Rico is a viable option for students, but it too has become imperiled by hurricanes, the island’s $73 billion in public debt, and competing demands for government funding. As such, more students will consider leaving the island in the years to come, and mainland colleges and universities need to accommodate this influx of students in a way that will best promote equality of opportunity.
About 30,000 students graduate from high school in Puerto Rico each year, and almost all of them take the PAA. By contrast, only 3,000 Puerto Rican students took the SAT in 2017, which pales in comparison to the roughly 43 percent of all U.S. seniors who took the SAT. This discrepancy, while unnoticed by most educational analysts, has a huge impact on the recruitment of Puerto Ricans to mainland universities. While many evoke a moral imperative for U.S. colleges to use SAT data to recruit students from poor and rural communities, these efforts specifically miss out on those students living in Puerto Rico, who have not been exposed to the same testing structures as mainland students. Since Puerto Rico’s college admissions process solely considers PAA scores and Grade Point Averages (GPAs) to evaluate applicants, the emphasis placed by mainland colleges on standardized tests like the SAT and ACT acts as a barrier to entry for many deserving Puerto Rican applicants. Not only does this represent a failure on behalf of the U.S. government and U.S. educational system to uphold equality of opportunity, it serves to further solidify the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as second-class in relation to the mainland U.S.
In the words of Harvard Professor and Puerto Rico native Roberto Rivera, the admissions process that developed in Puerto Rico is domestic in nature, but foreign in practice. Just as Puerto Rico’s educational inequities began long before the negligence that followed Hurricane Maria, colonialism has been a part of Puerto Rico’s history since its inception. After the U.S. seized Puerto Rico in the 1898 Spanish American war, what little autonomy the people of the Commonwealth had achieved was taken away. The U.S. quickly attempted to ‘Americanize’ Puerto Rico by implementing the English language, making it a federal offense to have a Puerto Rican flag, and even making it illegal to sing the Puerto Rican national anthem. Notably, despite their relegation to second-class citizenship, Puerto Ricans were the first to be drafted during the Vietnam War. Furthermore, Puerto Rico’s status as “territory” means it can’t re-negotiate its debt to Wall Street banks in a manner similar to how U.S. states can. All of these examples only exemplify the fact that, despite the efforts and victories of those who fought for the Island’s freedom, Puerto Rico has never truly been sovereign.
Instead, the people of Puerto Rico have been subjected to a capitalist dominated empire that sacrifices the lives of the less fortunate in the name of big business interests. As such, the college admissions process that developed mirrors the second-class status of Puerto Rico within the U.S. Rivera argues that standardized testing practices cannot be isolated from the history of colonial neglect that has shaped the Puerto Rico’s sociopolitical development. He instead sees the island’s educational system and reliance on the PAA as a mere extension of the same legal disenfranchisement employed by the U.S. federal government throughout history, borne out of the desire for profit and control instead of commitment to equality. The question, however, remains to be answered: What should governments be doing to address this inequality?
Independently, many colleges are beginning to shift towards test-optional policies, in which students are able to determine whether or not their test scores are included in the admissions process. This could be an indication that mainland schools are taking notice of the harmful effects of testing focus. Further, test-optional policies represent an opportunity to alleviate the burden of testing practices on Puerto Rican students, and thus offer a potential alternative to a total elimination of test scores in admissions. However, such independent movements are unfortunately not standardized across the U.S. and Puerto Rican students still face considerable barriers to entry when attempting to enter the higher education realm.
The federal government should therefore mandate that all colleges and universities in the U.S. no longer consider standardized tests when deciding whether or not to admit Puerto Rican applicants. This would go a long way to mitigate the barriers to accessing higher education that results from the mainland’s focus on standardized tests at the expense of Puerto Ricans. Furthermore, research on testing policy from Johns Hopkins indicates that an increased focus on GPA in place of standardized tests would favor minority students in the admissions process. For instance, students that identified as African American, Hispanic, female, or lower-income tended to have slightly higher standardized GPAs than ACT Composite scores. Conversely, white, male, and middle and higher-income students tended to have slightly higher standardized ACT Composite scores in comparison to their GPAs. This is an indication that forcing colleges to reform their admissions procedures and shift away from a focus on standardized testing could have overwhelmingly positive impacts with regards to equality of opportunity.
In considering the facts, the data speaks to a larger trend: the tendency for standardized testing to foster inequality at a systemic level. While history points to the urgent need for addressing the crisis of educational equality in Puerto Rico, this analysis also sheds light on the exclusionary tendencies of the College Board and U.S. government writ large, begging investigation into the harmful effects of the testing culture on mainland communities as well.