Admissions begins training readers

By Noah Grand
Daily Bruin Reporter

The admissions office is training readers to review freshman
applications based on an interim Academic Senate report that has
not been approved by the body as a whole.

The admissions office must use the interim report to train
readers, since they start reading applications in less than a
month.

Academic Senate chair John Edmond said he hasn’t decided
if the criteria ““ developed by the Academic Senate’s
Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools
““ must be approved by another committee before being
used.

Committee decisions usually need final approval by a full
Academic Senate vote.

Tom Lifka, who served as interim director of admissions during
most discussions of comprehensive review, said the Academic Senate
told him to go ahead and implement the criteria CUARS approved for
this year.

Comprehensive review is a policy that evaluates each application
in terms of the applicant’s academic and personal
achievements and life challenges.

Readers will rank academic achievements on a scale of one to six
and the other areas on a one to five scale, with one being the
best, according to Lifka.

The academic rank is based on information such as test scores
and high school GPA. Personal achievements and life challenges are
partially based on self-reported information, such as family income
and the personal statement.

Readers have a formula for academic rankings, but Lifka said the
readers have some discretion in assigning rankings.

The formula for the ranks is not public because the numbers used
change yearly, and Lifka said he does not want people to look at
the formula and assume what rank they will receive.

Two readers will rank an applicant’s academic
achievements, and a third reader will rank a student’s
personal achievements and life challenges. Academic criteria will
still be the most important, Lifka said.

Admissions office members who will train the application readers
are still being trained themselves, Lifka said. Readers will start
training in the next two weeks, since they will start reviewing
applications in mid-December.

The admissions staff then has two and a half months to review
the more than 42,000 expected applications.

The Legislative Assembly, the full body of the Academic Senate
that is the last to vote on all issues, does not meet again until
February. By this time, most evaluations must be reviewed.

“Some of these things had to be implemented before you
could really have a full discussion before the Legislative
Assembly,” said Nicolas Entrikin, chair of CUARS.

Entrikin’s committee worked during the summer to discuss
how comprehensive review would be implemented at UCLA if it were
approved.

During these meetings, in which members of the admissions office
and students were present, the committee wrote the interim report
currently being used by the admissions office

The admissions office informed the committee of what was
possible, given the number of applications UCLA gets. They were
also able to take the committee’s recommendations and develop
training documents for readers, Entrikin said.

“What we’re asking for is a quality process,”
Edmond said. “It is going to take three meetings of the
Legislative Assembly to get everything out on the table. (The
faculty members) are novices on this.”