Peter Schrag: UC admissions: Slouching toward affirmative action?

Any plan to change the undergraduate admissions system at the University of California is likely to bring charges that it's yet another politically correct attempt to reinstitute race preferences. That applies especially to reforms that de-emphasize grades and test scores.

A set of major revisions now proposed by BOARS, UC's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, will be no exception. It would make more high school graduates eligible for consideration for UC but end the virtual guarantee of eligibility that students with high grades and test scores – those in the hypothetical top 12.5 percent of California high school graduates, many of them Asians – now enjoy.

Only those in the top 4 percent in their respective schools would still be guaranteed a place in the system.

Yet complex as they are, the proposals and BOARS' analysis of the flaws of the existing system are buffered with enough reasoning to be worth the debate, if not the backlash that could follow if they're adopted.

The UC admissions system is now a two-step process: (1) achieving eligibility for some UC campuses, though not necessarily Berkeley, UCLA or San Diego, on the basis of a combination of SAT or ACT test scores and grades in the UC-required "a-to-g" high school courses, and (2) "comprehensive review" of an eligible applicant's entire record by the campuses to which he or she applies, from grades and test scores to extracurricular achievements, community service and handicaps overcome.

The board, said BOARS chairman Mark Rashid, an engineering professor at UC Davis, would like to loosen the "prefilter" now imposed by the eligibility requirement and put more weight on the comprehensive review of each applicant at the campuses to which the student applies.

There would still be minimum requirements – completion of the 15 "a-to-g" courses – English, math, science, social studies, etc. – that UC demands, a GPA of 2.8 or higher in those courses and the SAT Reasoning Test, formerly the SAT I.

But the SAT II subject-matter tests would no longer be required. Since the SAT I was revised to include writing and more substantive math items, UC believes, scores on the SAT II tests contribute little additional information in predicting whether an applicant will be successful at the university.

At the same time, BOARS says, because a large percentage of poor, Latino and black students don't take the SAT II tests, that requirement alone – not grades or test scores – has shut out a large percentage of those groups from the pool of eligibles. The largest disqualifying factor among students taking the "a-to-g" courses is students' failure to take the SAT II tests.

Moreover, says Rashid, the current guarantee of eligibility for students with a combination of high grades and test scores adds almost nothing in practical terms. Students who are guaranteed eligibility for UC but aren't admitted to the campuses to which they apply are bumped to a campus – inevitably Riverside or Merced – where there is space. But almost nobody takes those offers.

"By inviting a broader pool of prospective students to apply and be evaluated under comprehensive review," Rashid says, "campuses can make a better and more fair determination of academic merit by looking at all of the students' achievements in the context of their particular schools and personal circumstances.

"This is what our selective campuses do now when they choose among eligible students; every applicant should get the same opportunity."

BOARS calculates that without the SAT II requirements many more students would be UC eligible. The existing system, Rashid maintains, denies the campuses the opportunity to choose students who might contribute more than those admitted now.

Obviously, elimination of the SAT II requirement doesn't mean that thousands more applicants will be admitted. But it would enlarge the pool from which campuses can choose. And it's here that the plan becomes vulnerable to criticism and dispute.

Leaving aside suspicions of bad faith by admissions officers – that in applying the more squishy criteria of comprehensive review, they'll pursue diversity and overlook competence by giving blacks and Latinos preferences, either consciously or otherwise – the system will still find it tougher to justify its decisions.

When hard numbers – tests, grades – are used at least to define eligibility for the pool from which campuses choose, decisions can always be defended with "objective" facts. That those numbers sometimes don't mean much doesn't make the alternative criteria any easier to defend. And, of course, the numbers do mean something. There may not be much difference between 650 and 700 on an SAT math test, but there surely is between 500 and 750.

In the decades before (and just after World II), the Ivy League and other elite colleges downplayed tests and grades in order to pick the "whole man," meaning white shoe WASPS from the right social backgrounds. Comprehensive review may never become the black-brown version of that, but UC could still have a hard time persuading the skeptics.

About the writer:

• Peter Schrag can be reached at Box 15779, Sacramento, CA 95852-0779 or at pschrag@sacbee.com.