After last week’s approval of the new holistic admissions
process, UCLA will need to hire more application readers, and
applicants may be receiving their acceptance letters weeks later
than they have in the past.
Though the faculty senate has voted to approve the new
admissions process, a final version of the guidelines has yet to be
composed, said Adrienne Lavine, former chairwoman of the Academic
Senate.
The new set of guidelines will be established by the senate and
will govern the new admissions process. Currently, only a framework
for the new process has been approved.
UCLA’s old admissions process involved application readers
scoring separate sections without ever reading the entire
application. The new process will resemble that of UC Berkeley,
where application readers look at an application as a whole and
score it in its entirety.
To be approved, the framework for the admissions process had to
pass through three Academic Senate committees, which was done
within the past two months.
The administration and the senate had been working on the new
admissions process for over a year, but after Interim Chancellor
Norman Abrams took over for former Chancellor Albert Carnesale, he
made the new process a priority, said Janina Montero, vice
chancellor of student affairs.
Montero said Abrams promised faculty leaders that if they
approved a new admissions process the resources would be made
available for it to be implemented.
Under the new process, applicants may not receive their letters
of acceptance until April 1, rather than mid March as was the case
in the past, Montero said.
“We know that we are going to need to hire more readers
than we have in the past, and the process (of reading and scoring
the applications) will take longer than the prior process,”
Montero added.
Because UCLA’s new process is modeled closely after UC
Berkeley’s, UCLA’s application readers will be trained
by UC Berkeley employees this year so that next year UCLA can start
adapting the process, she said.
In addition to changing the way applications are read, readers
will also have more information available to them.
“We will have information for the readers about where each
student falls within their high school, … on measures such as
GPA, test scores and number of honors courses. … We will
emphasize the student’s performance relative to opportunities
available in their high school,” Lavine said, adding that UC
Berkeley will help UCLA access this information, but nothing on the
application will change.
Though all of the information in an application will remain the
same as it has been, Lavine said application readers may gain new
insight into applicants.
“The main difference is to be able to look at everything
together and get some insight. You might see something from the
essay that explains something from the academic side and get a
better understanding of the applicant,” she said.
Administrators and student leaders have expressed hope that the
new application process will increase the number of
underrepresented minority students at UCLA, but Marwa Kaisey,
Undergraduate Students Association Council president, said
universities will have a hard time fixing the problem.
“This needs to come with efforts on a bigger scale to
rework the K-12 education system so more kids are UC-eligible when
they graduate high school,” she said.
Montero said she feels students will not change how they fill
out applications to take advantage of the new system.
“The way students present themselves should remain the
same because we are asking for the same information.”
“We are going to be able to learn more about the
individual and the context that the student comes from,”
Montero added. “The process will be thoughtful, fair and
attentive to each student’s experience.