Students applying for admission to UCLA in the fall may be faced
with an entirely new admissions process in which university
officials read a student’s entire application rather than
scoring individual sections separately.
An Academic Senate committee recently approved a proposal to
change the way UCLA’s applications are read and scored,
partly in an effort to increase underrepresented minority
admissions and with hopes that a new program can be finalized by
December.
“This will allow us to understand the relationship between
an applicant’s academics, extracurricular activities, the
context of the (high) school, and family and personal
environment,” said Adrienne Lavine, outgoing chairwoman of
the Academic Senate.
Lavine emphasized that this is only one step in approving the
new admissions process. If the new admissions system is approved it
could potentially apply to upcoming fall applicants.
Currently, several sections of the application are read
independently and the scores are combined so that no one person
reads an entire application.
Though the process of changing UCLA’s admissions policies
began last year, acting Chancellor Norman Abrams made it a priority
and spurred the Academic Senate to finish as quickly as
possible.
Abrams and members of the Academic Senate hope to model
UCLA’s admissions process after UC Berkeley’s, in which
several people read an entire application so it can be scored as a
package.
UC Berkeley admits more minority students than UCLA.
The model used by UC Berkeley has been dubbed by administrators
the “holistic approach” to looking at applicants, and
Lavine said this allows the overall score to better reflect an
applicant’s life situation.
Recently, UCLA has faced considerable public scrutiny for a
steady drop in underrepresented minority students that are both
admitted and choose to enroll, but Lavine said the controversial
admissions statistics are part of a larger examination of the
fairness of UCLA’s admissions process.
“We intended to take a closer look at the admissions
process anyway, but the drop in minority admissions helped to spur
the review,” she said.
Minority admissions at the University of California dropped
considerably after California voters approved Proposition 209 in
1996, which banned the use of race or ethnicity as a factor in
university admissions and public employment in California.
Since Proposition 209, the UC system has adopted an admissions
process called comprehensive review, which takes into account
academic achievements as well as life challenges. Various UC
schools have adopted different admissions practices within the
comprehensive review framework and have had different levels of
minority student admits.
Thomas Lifka, assistant vice chancellor for student academic
services, said the change to the admissions process reflects a new
philosophical approach to admissions that UCLA is embracing.
“We are trying to avoid admitting one person over another
based on (one) quantifiable factor,” he said, adding that a
difference of 10 points on a student’s SAT score should not
be the deciding feature of his or her application.
Lifka said he doesn’t expect to see radical changes in the
kinds of students who are admitted, and generally qualified
applicants that would have been admitted in the old system will be
admitted in the new system. He said the main impact will likely be
on students along margins.
“(The new process) would mean a considerable amount of new
resources, but the chancellor is behind it and has assured that the
resources would be available,” said Janina Montero, vice
chancellor of student affairs, referring to additional application
readers that may need to be hired.
Montero said if the new admissions process is approved and
vetted by the Academic Senate, many of the finer points of the plan
will need to be worked out, but explicitly said that race will not
be a factor.
“People are poised to work on the details, but they need
to wait for additional faculty bodies’ approval,”
Montero said.
Lavine said the results of changing the admissions process will
be unpredictable.
“This is not a magic bullet to increase minority
admissions,” she said. “We don’t know if it will
work.”