Against the Odds Is How They Have Prevailed

Bounced from foster care to the homes of assorted relatives, Damon Witts of East Oakland learned early on to believe in himself. With his father dead and his mother out of the picture, there was no one else to rely on.

During his senior year of high school, he lived on his own, paying the bills with a part-time job and money from public assistance.

When applying for college, he was confident. He had strong grades, was a student leader and “I took advantage of every opportunity and resource I had.”

His SAT score was low: 980 on an exam where 1600 is perfect. But he didn’t worry about it. No one else seemed worried either -- not his counselors or teachers. And sure enough, he was admitted to UC Berkeley’s freshman class this fall. He won enough in scholarships to all but pay his way.

In recent days, however, Witts and other students here with SAT scores below the campus norm have found themselves at the uncomfortable nexus of a statewide debate about admissions at the University of California, particularly at UC Berkeley, its oldest and generally most selective campus.

Two weeks ago, the head of UC’s governing board, John J. Moores, jolted the system by issuing a report showing that nearly 400 students with modest SAT scores were admitted to the campus in 2002, even as more than 3,000 with extremely high scores were turned away.

Moores publicly criticized Berkeley’s decision to admit the low-scoring students, saying others should have been accepted instead. This week, UCLA, which rivals UC Berkeley for competitiveness, reported an admissions pattern similar to UC Berkeley’s.

At the heart of the debate is the university’s 2-year-old admissions policy, known as comprehensive review, which places less emphasis on tests and grades and more on such factors as leadership, socioeconomic factors and personal achievement.

One UC regent, Ward Connerly, has suggested that the approach has become a back-door route to getting around a state ban on affirmative action.

UC and Berkeley officials strongly deny that, saying that each student was accepted on the basis of academic achievement or exceptional talent, and many did well despite poor high schools, family poverty or other personal hardship.

Of the 386 students admitted that year with SAT scores between 600 and 1000, 56% attended public high schools considered to be low-performing, with few resources, according to data released to The Times this week by UC Berkeley admissions officials. Nearly 24% are from single-parent families. About 59% have annual family incomes below $35,400. And for nearly 78%, neither parent is a four-year college graduate.

The vast majority of the students with SAT scores below 1000 who were admitted at Berkeley in the last two years were Latino, Asian or black. According an analysis of UC figures for fall admissions, the Berkeley campus admitted 760 applicants with low SAT scores. Latinos accounted for 48% of the group, Asians 25% and blacks, 18%. Whites were 5% of the total.

Officials have declined to release the names of the students at the center of the debate, citing privacy concerns.

But on Thursday, a handful of freshmen outside a campus tutoring center told their stories, arguing that their low SAT scores are the least important part of who they are.

Damon Witts

“I don’t think my potential or my ability should be undermined by my SAT score,” Witts said Thursday morning as he sat in the breeze outside the Student Learning Center. He and the others interviewed had just completed an extra math class, which is taught alongside their pre-calculus lecture class and is aimed at giving them extra help.

But Witts, who was student body president at his high school, also said the first few weeks have been tough for him, both personally and academically, on a campus where the average SAT is above 1300.

He has rarely felt so alone as he did during orientation, he said, amid the bustle of other students arriving with their families who helped them move in.

“Watching everybody else, I kind of felt like I lost some motivation,” he said.

But after nearly two months at school, he’s finding his way, making friends, feeling more comfortable and gaining ground in his classes.

“I’m still struggling on my writing, but math is good and science is OK,” he said. He spends a number of hours each week at the learning center, which until the early 1990s was open only to minority students but now welcomes all students.

Moores “doesn’t know me,” Witts said. “He doesn’t know what it’s like to try to educate yourself at a mediocre high school when you’re also dealing with all this stuff at home.”

“I know what I can do, and I belong here.”

Camellia Pham

Like Witts, Camellia Pham says she was optimistic that she would be admitted by UC Berkeley, despite scoring only 960 on the SAT.

As the third of six children in a low-income San Francisco family, Pham says she carried many burdens, including holding down a job and helping to care for her younger siblings. “I went through so many things that, you know, who wouldn’t accept me?”

Besides, Pham, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, had grown accustomed to succeeding. At Balboa High School in San Francisco, she was a tennis team captain, an ROTC battalion commander, a member of the debate team and chapter president of the California Scholarship Federation.

In what time Pham had left, she volunteered in soup kitchens, a children’s public health organization and at City Hall.

“All these challenges I face in high school, that’s what makes it easy for me to survive at Cal, because I’ve been on my own, and I know how to get by,” she said. “Now that I’m here, it makes it so much easier for me to focus. I have nothing to worry about anymore.”

“I see so many people with, like, 1500 SAT scores and the best [grades] ever, and they never had any burdens,” Pham added. “They had everything laid out for them. And they’re barely making it through Cal because they don’t know how to survive on their own.”

Pham, who plans to major in cell and molecular biology in hopes of eventually becoming a pediatrician, is the first person in her family to attend college. Her older brother and older sister dropped out of high school. Pham hopes to set a better example for her three younger brothers.

“Everyone in our family felt like we had no hope,” she said. But since Pham was accepted at UC Berkeley, she said, her younger brothers seem to have adopted an attitude that “we have to keep it up and get into one of the UCs too.”

Sara Coulas

Not all of the admitted students with modest or low SAT scores are ethnic or racial minorities. Sara Coulas, for instance, is a white, 19-year-old freshman from an upscale “white picket fence” neighborhood in Thousand Oaks.

Still, she has encountered hurdles in her education. Coulas has learning disabilities. She struggles with dyslexia and what she described as “partial processing” problems, which sometimes make it difficult to retrieve, or communicate, information that she has learned.

Coulas took the SAT twice, moving up from 980 on her first test to 1020 on her second try, when she was granted extra time because of her disabilities.

“I’m a really bad test taker.... I have good grades in classes, but every time when it would come to tests or the SAT, it was like, ‘What happened?’ There’s a big empty space.

“I was amazed when I got in here,” Coulas added. “I was given an opportunity that not many other students are given.”

In fact, Coulas didn’t get into any of the other six schools she applied to, all of them Cal State or University of California campuses. Her top choice was UCLA -- which, Coulas said, turned her down even after she lodged two appeals.

The main reason she applied to Berkeley was a tip from her junior year high school English teacher. “She said apply to Berkeley because they read every essay,” Coulas recalled. So, she resolved to write about her disabilities, figuring, “it showed how hard I had to work” to succeed in school.

Coulas says former classmates from high school sometimes ask how she got into Berkeley. Coulas tells them: “I got in because Berkeley has this wonderful disabilities program, and they saw I worked really hard for what I have.”

Still, the comments often hurt her. “There are other students who were in my AP English class from my senior year who go here who don’t think I belong here. A lot of them say, ‘Did you get in for an extension course? And I say ‘No. I’m a regular student.’ ”

“I know I’m as smart as all of them. I just struggle with a disability.”

Taisha Ford

Taisha Ford, 18, said she has never done well on standardized tests. The first time she took the SAT, she scored 850.

“I didn’t even know what it meant, but then people told me you could score up to 1600. ‘Oh man, that’s horrible!’ ” she remembered thinking.

She tried again, and got 900. She took an SAT prep course and tried again: The score was 930.

Happy she had improved each time, she comforted herself:

“I thought why should it hurt me? It had nothing to do with how I do in school,” said Ford, of Oakland, whose grades sank a bit when her parents divorced at the beginning of high school. “I had always wanted to go to Berkeley.”

With a 3.4 grade point average, a background as a swimmer and cross-country runner, and involvement in a UC outreach program, she hoped for the best, and was thrilled to get in.

At Berkeley, free to focus on her studies and without the distraction of traveling between her parents’ homes, her grades are better than before. She’s getting A’s in most subjects, she said, and even helping tutor a few friends in math.

Ford’s determination is a common theme among Berkeley students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, said Cara Stanley, director of the campus’ Student Learning Center.

She noted that these students, once at Berkeley, have to meet the same standards as their peers.

“No one gives these students the degree; no one takes the exams for them. They have to make it like anyone else.”