Comprehensive review approved

By Noah Grand
Daily Bruin Reporter

The UC system-wide Academic Senate unanimously approved
comprehensive review in their meeting at UCLA Wednesday.

The proposal, which sets a framework for considering UC
applicants in terms of academics, personal achievement and life
challenges, must be approved by the UC Regents in November before
being finalized.

“This is a historic occasion that the assembly unanimously
affirmed this,” said Chand Viswanathan, the system-wide
Academic Senate Chair. “It shows that the senate is very
strongly committed to comprehensive review.”

Comprehensive review is intended to look at all aspects of an
application instead of making decisions based solely on academics.
It is also expected to help socioeconomically disadvantaged
students, who generally have lower high school GPAs and test
scores.

If approved by the regents, individual campuses must still
decide how they are going to implement the new system of
admissions.

“We set up the criteria to try and give campuses as much
latitude as possible in making decisions,” said Dorothy
Perry, chair of the Board on Admissions and Relations with
Schools.

The biggest question about comprehensive review is funding. The
state legislature provided $750,000 in the budget for implementing
comprehensive admissions, but Viswanathan said he was not sure how
much the program would cost.

Further budget concerns were raised after Gov. Gray Davis asked
all state agencies to prepare what they would do if their budget
was cut by 15 percent. UC President Richard Atkinson dismissed
these concerns.

“I do not think that funding is a major issue,”
Atkinson said in a presentation to the Academic Senate, adding that
he was negotiating budget cuts.

“There will be some cuts, but they will not be as serious
as 15 percent,’ Atkinson said.

The final cost of comprehensive review depends on how individual
campuses decide to implement the program and how many readers are
required.

“If it is required to read every application twice, that
would break the back of some of UC’s admissions
offices,” said Evelyn Silvia, a member of the UC Davis
Academic Senate, explaining how the offices could not handle a more
thorough reading of applications.

While the Academic Senate agreed on the new admissions
framework, there remained many questions about the use of specific
admissions criteria. Perry said each campus is free to determine
how much weight they give to specific criteria, but academic
achievement should be considered the most important.

Concerns were raised over comprehensive admissions reducing the
quality of the UC student body. Quality has traditionally been
measured by test scores and high school GPA, but some supporters of
comprehensive review favor a new definition of quality that also
considers an applicant’s personal achievement and life
challenges.

Even under comprehensive review, the criteria for UC eligibility
““ a formula considering an applicant’s high school GPA
and SAT scores ““ will not change.

“We do believe we will be able to maintain, if not
improve, the quality of students we admit,” Perry said.

UCLA is planning on having two readers rank an applicant’s
academic criteria and having one reader rank the applicant’s
personal achievements and life challenges, according to Tom Lifka,
interim director of admissions.

BOARS worked on the proposal with help from Academic Senate
committees at each UC campus throughout the summer after the
regents passed RE-28 in May, which repealed SP-1 and gave the
Academic Senate control over admissions subject to the
regents’ approval.

Comprehensive admissions eliminates the two-tiered system of
admissions instituted in 1995 when the regents passed SP-1, a
policy that banned affirmative action in admissions.

Between 50 and 75 percent of admissions decisions had to be made
using academic criteria under SP-1.