“˜Comprehensive review’ far from comprehensible
By Daily Bruin Staff
Oct. 23, 2001 9:00 p.m.
Benjamin is the co-founder of Students First in California.
By David Benjamin
This fall, there is a new TV show on NBC that is receiving a lot
of hype. It’s called “UC: Undercover”. This fall,
there’s also a University of California proposal to adopt a
comprehensive admissions process that will not rely on any clear
formula. If this new UC admissions proposal goes through,
Californians may find themselves with their own reality show called
“UC: Undercover.”
For years, students and parents have asked me a simple question:
“How does Berkeley make its decisions?” They want to
know how much the GPA counts, how much the SAT I and SAT II count,
and how extracurricular activities fit into the
decision-making.
In the past, every time that I have called Berkeley admissions,
I have gotten this response: “Well, we look at a lot of
factors. We look at the whole person.” Lately, I have been
able to get some more information. Here’s how it works:
Currently, two Berkeley readers look at each application for
approximately 10 to 15 minutes and then rate the student. But how
do the readers decide the rating for each student? Incredibly, in
the Berkeley system, there is no fixed weight put on any criteria
(GPA, SAT scores, etc.).
Worst of all, Berkeley is practicing what I call “academic
profiling.” Each reader gets a file that contains not only
the student’s ranking in the overall applicant pool, but also
the ranking of the student in the applicant pool from his own high
school. In other words, if you are a student who goes to a great
school like University High School in Irvine, Calif., you will be
compared to all of the other students who apply to Berkeley from
University High School in a given year. If you happen to be
applying to Berkeley in a year when there are a lot of great
candidates from University High School, good luck.
UCLA recently announced that they were seeking a similar
admissions process. One of the new areas of admissions evaluation
would be “life challenges.” What are you supposed to do
if you are a white applicant from Newport Beach and you
haven’t experienced any “life challenges” ““
drive down to the San Diego Wild Animal Park and jump in the tiger
pit?
Now, here is the scary part. UC President Richard Atkinson is
proposing that all UC campuses move to a completely comprehensive
review process. If UC moves to a comprehensive review process
system-wide, applicants will never know why they didn’t get
into UCLA or any other UC campus.
If the admissions offices are really efficient, maybe they will
just patch you into a voice recording when you call up. “We
are sorry that you have been rejected by the University of
California at Berkeley. This year we had a lot of fine candidates.
At UCLA we look at the whole person. It could have been your GPA,
your SAT I or SAT II scores, or the fact that your mother
didn’t do a good job correcting the grammar mistakes on your
application essay. Perhaps you haven’t overcome enough of
“˜life’s challenges,’ or perhaps it was simply the
fact that you didn’t attend a sufficiently horrible high
school.”
As Californians, we should not stand for this nonsense. If
comprehensive admission is to become the standard within the UC
system, then its proponents should step forward and give us a
crystal-clear view of the process. How can you have a
“comprehensive” admissions policy if no one can
comprehend it?
Discriminatory processes like academic profiling should be made
public. Lawmakers should also be examining the entire comprehensive
admissions proposal because it may very likely be a violation of
Proposition 209. In fact, in a recent Daily Bruin article
(“Admissions to drop tier system,” Daily Bruin, News,
Oct. 2), UC vice chancellor of legal affairs Joseph Mandel was
cited as saying that the new UC policy, RE-28, is “the
university’s way around Proposition 209. It gives each campus
the jurisdiction to change its criteria for admissions to encourage
diversity by becoming less number-dependent.”
Maybe I am missing something, but I have always thought that the
purpose of the UC system is the pursuit of excellence. If President
Atkinson gets his wish, and comprehensive admissions goes into
effect for all UC campuses, maybe he should go one step further and
rename the entire system. Instead of UC, it should be U don’t
C.
