UC tries to increase applicant pool
By Chris Eldredge
Nov. 28, 2007 10:43 p.m.
A proposal to change admissions policy for the entire University of California is under review at UC campuses.
Among the proposed changes, the plan would no longer guarantee admission to students who meet certain eligibility requirements or require students to submit SAT Subject Test scores, in order to increase the UC applicant pool, university officials said.
“(There are) students that are not eligible even though they have high grades. Those are the students that we are trying to capture or at least make visible to UC,” said Mark Rashid, a UC Davis professor and chairman of the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, the faculty committee that oversees admissions within the UC Academic Senate.
The senate, which put forth the proposal, has invited faculty at each UC to review it and submit feedback by Dec. 5.
UCLA has addressed some concerns with the current proposal, but overall gave favorable feedback to the senate, said Aaron Israel, an student representative on UCLA’s Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools (CUARS), which reviewed the proposal.
While the proposal would require applicants to take the SAT Reasoning Test or ACT plus writing, their scores would no longer influence eligibility. Students would be eligible as long as they submitted these standardized test scores, earned an unweighted grade point average of 2.8 or higher in required UC-approved “A-G” courses, and took at least 11 of the 15 required courses by the end of their junior year.
Currently, applicants must meet a minimum combination of GPA, SAT or ACT plus writing scores, and SAT Subject Test scores determined by the Eligibility Index. If applicants meet this criteria and also complete the “A-G” coursework, they are guaranteed a spot at a UC campus.
If applicants that are guaranteed admission are rejected from all campuses to which they apply, their application is forwarded to campuses with open space, previously UC Merced and UC Riverside, according to a statement.
In order for the UC to guarantee admission as it currently does, eligibility guidelines must be strictly enforced, which excludes many high achieving students who may only be missing one requirement, Rashid said.
Removing the guarantee, along with other proposed changes, would create a much wider applicant pool and give students who did not have the same access to academic counseling a better chance of having their application read, he said.
While removing the guarantee of admission may seem like bad news for some California high school students, only about 6 percent of all applicants ““ roughly 300 students ““ make use of this guarantee, Rashid said.
The proposal suggests eliminating the SAT Subject Test because, by comparing UC students’ first-year grades with their standardized test scores, the university found that subject tests provide almost no additional information about college readiness.
A 2003 study estimated that about 10,000 seniors were ineligible for UC admissions because they did not take the subject tests, according a statement from the UC Office of the President.
UCLA reviewed the proposal by taking into account concerns of the entire UCLA community, said Rachel Stauber, a student representative on CUARS.
The system-wide Academic Senate will take feedback from faculty at UC campuses into account when deciding whether to modify the proposal or vote on sending it to the UC Regents.
