The University of California has introduced new personal statement prompts aimed at giving admissions officers a more complete view of applicants and their backgrounds, as opposed to simply their grades and test scores.
The move is meant to complement the UC’s comprehensive review admissions policy, which looks at students within the context of their academic and extracurricular environment.
The new prompts ask students to describe their personal backgrounds, including influential experiences and unique circumstances.
“We look at students in context. We want to understand student achievement in the context of how they achieved them,” said Susan Wilbur, director of undergraduate admissions for the UC, noting that achievement can be influenced by a student’s family and school.
The decision to introduce new prompts was partly initiated during a meeting of admissions directors from different UC campuses last year. Several admissions directors expressed dissatisfaction with the old prompts, saying they did not feel they were receiving valuable enough information about the applicants.
Wilbur and Vu Tran, UCLA’s admissions director, both noted that one of the old prompts was especially problematic.
It asked students to describe how they had taken advantage of the educational opportunities offered to them to prepare for college.
But Tran and Wilbur said students’ answers often repeated information already provided elsewhere in the application.
“Many of them repeat, in a sense, pieces of academic data,” Tran said, adding that many students used the question to describe the honors and AP courses they had taken, though those were already visible to admissions officers on the students’ transcripts.
University officials opted to change that prompt for freshman applicants, and now it asks students to describe their “world” and how it has shaped their hopes and dreams.
The second prompt now asks students to discuss a personal quality or experience that is important to them.
There is still an “additional comments” section, so applicants can include any information not covered elsewhere.
“What we were hoping for were questions that could give better information about our students,” Wilbur said. “These prompts are intended to fill out that picture.”
The change comes just one year after UCLA tweaked its own admissions process in an effort to look at students in a big-picture context, and Tran said he believes the new prompts will complement that process.
Last year, UCLA implemented holistic review, which gives more weight to students’ personal experiences and backgrounds.
“Definitely it complements our policy of looking at students in the context of where they’re coming from,” Tran said of the new prompts.
He added that he believes allowing students to describe their environments will give application readers access to details that would otherwise be difficult to determine.
“Even in the same school, opportunities may not be available across the board,” he said.
And while Tran said it is too early to tell how the new personal statement prompts will affect incoming freshman classes at UCLA, he said they will likely help maximize opportunities for students from disadvantaged backgrounds ““ a major goal of holistic review.
Angela Pesce, a senior at St. Francis High School near Sacramento who plans on applying to the UCs in the fall, said in general she likes the new questions.
“I guess they’re good because it will give them a different perspective, help them get to know you as a person,” she said. “If you’re involved in your community, like service … you can kind of get that across (in other parts of the application), but in terms of how that’s affected you or changed you, I think that’s harder to express.”
But Pesce added that in some ways she still prefers personal statement prompts she has seen on applications for other schools. In particular, she noted the Common Application, which gives students seven prompts and asks them to respond to one.
“You have more choices … whereas (on the UC application) it’s like, here are your questions ““ answer them,” she said.
But Wilbur said she believes the new personal statement prompts are broad enough to allow students to interpret and be creative.
“This gives students the chance to expand on either or both prompts,” she said. “These prompts can be comfortably answered by all students.”