New Entry Criteria : Grades Alone Won’t Earn a Place at UCI

Inundated with applications from more bright high school students than they can possibly admit, UC Irvine and UCLA are changing their admission procedures next fall.

The two campuses, which until now have based admission decisions almost solely on grades and test scores, will also review other accomplishments such as extracurricular high school activities and community involvement.

“We didn’t do that this year, but we wish we had,” said James E. Dunning, director of admissions at UC Irvine. “We wanted to enroll only 2,200 this fall, but we ended up with 2,900 freshmen.”

Dunning said that in September, 1987, UCI “definitely” plans to hold to the 2,200 limit. He estimates that about half of those students will be admitted strictly on the basis of grades “because they’re academic superstars.” The other half will be admitted in part because of other achievements.

UCLA is somewhat similarly changing next fall to a “subjective” review process not unlike that used by private colleges, said Rae Lee Siporin, UCLA’s director of admission.

The new UCLA system requires that at least two faculty members or admissions officers read and evaluate every applicant.

“In essence, we have decided that it is not fair to use strictly objective numbers to select students even at the top of the applicant pool,” said Thomas E. Lifka, UCLA’s assistant vice chancellor for registration.

“What it means,” he said, “is that it is not enough just to have a 4.0 GPA and high test scores. . . . We now have so many applicants that if we evaluated students just on the basis of objective numbers, we would be admitting one student with a 3.9 and rejecting another with a 3.8. . . . When the numbers are that close, such arbitrary cuts simply are not fair. Some kind of subjective evaluation must be made all the way up and down the line.”

A mountain of applications that far exceeds the number of available places for students also exists at Berkeley, which also shares what one university official calls “brand-name recognition.” As a result, Berkeley is also modifying its admissions policy, though not nearly as dramatically.

The new system, UCLA’s Siporin said, will have a direct impact only on regular applicants, namely whites and Asians, who are not members of designated “under-represented” minority groups. Students who are designated as under-represented--that is, blacks, Latinos and American Indians--and who meet the state’s minimum eligibility requirements for UC will continue to be automatically admitted to UCLA, UCI, or any other UC campus under state guidelines designed to boost enrollments of certain disadvantaged groups.

The new procedure will be used for those students who are applying to enter UCI and UCLA in the fall of 1987. Those applications are due at the end of this month.

Dunning said that the system isn’t totally new to UCI. “We did this in the late 1960s, when, as a new campus, we were the most oversubscribed in the (UC) system,” he said.

No new admissions forms or materials will be required from high school students seeking admission to UCI, Dunning said. “The existing material, notably the essay that each student submits, contains information about their background.”

At UCLA, the admissions committee will look not only at obvious, objective indications of students’ abilities and achievements, Siporin said, but more subjective measures such as the quality and content of their courses, the overall difficulty of their high school programs and, in certain borderline cases, their commitment to extracurricular activities and their ability to express those commitments in an essay.

In some over-enrolled departments, particularly engineering, UCI and other UC campuses have been using and will continue to use a similar selection process. Most of the UC campuses, however, have not had to develop such an elaborate selection system simply because they do not have the volume of applications to warrant it.

In deciding that UCLA should abandon its practice of taking any student on the basis of test scores or grades alone, Siporin said she thinks that “there is something drastically wrong when a university reduces a student to a number.”

“Practically speaking,” she said, “I am confident that 80% of the students we admit to UCLA we would admit anyway, whatever review process we used. But there is 20% that I am not so sure about. In order to make better decisions about those students, we need to look very carefully at the entire applicant pool.”

UCLA officials are eager to publicize their approach in the hope that it will eliminate some of the public misunderstanding about what it means to be “eligible” to attend the University of California.

Under state law, all California high school students who complete a set of required courses and who rank in the upper 12% of their high school graduating classes on the basis of grade-point average and standardized test scores are eligible for admission to the UC system, just as students in the upper third of their graduating classes are eligible for admission to the California State University system.

Eligibility, however, only assures students of a place somewhere in the university system, not necessarily the campus of their choice.

Process Changed

Although students are now free to apply to whatever campuses they choose, the campuses are in turn free to choose the students they want.

Last year there was a change in the overall application process, which for the first time in the university’s history allowed students to apply to as many UC campuses as they wanted. Under the old procedure, eligible students who did not get into the one campus where they applied were “redirected” to a UC campus that had fewer applicants. Now the students are free to make their own selection from the available options.

In its first year of operation, the multi-application process left all eight undergraduate campuses uncertain how many offers of admission to extend. The result was some unexpected under-enrollment problems on some campuses and overcrowding on others. UCI was among the latter.

Despite what appeared to be a temporary glitch in the system, over the years, there have been fairly consistent trends in students’ application patterns at the various UC campuses, Ed Apodaca, UC’s coordinator for admissions, said. While some campuses often had to struggle to fill their classes, others have traditionally had about as many qualified applicants as they could accommodate in most departments, although some campuses have had shifts from year to year, he noted.

Applications appear to be growing at all the campuses that do not have the “brand-name recognition” of UCLA and Berkeley and there are indications that they may become even more popular in the next few years--a trend the UC central administration clearly supports, said Alice C. Cox, assistant vice president in UC’s central office.

For UCLA and Berkeley, however, the story has been quite different. For years, applications to the freshmen classes have far exceeded the available slots, and the campuses have had to turn down ever growing numbers of qualified students.

For this year’s freshman class, which entered in September, for example, Berkeley reached a new high of more than 20,000 applications for only about 3,400 places, while UCLA had 21,000 applications for about 4,000 places.

In contrast to UCLA, Berkeley will continue to select a portion of its freshman class on the basis of scores and grades alone, according to Richard H. Shaw Jr., associate director of admissions.

Admission will be automatic, Shaw said, for students who score in the top 8% on either the math or verbal portions of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Overall, the top 40% of Berkeley’s applicant pool will be admitted on the basis of a formula derived from test scores and grades--down from 50% in previous years.

The remaining 60% of Berkeley’s applicant pool, he said, will be granted a “supplemental review” in which they may be awarded extra points in the formula for such factors as California residence, economic hardship, proficiency in written English and additional years of foreign languages, sciences and mathematics.

Like the other campuses, Berkeley will also continue to admit all eligible under-represented minorities for next fall. Because of a housing shortage, Berkeley used to give preference to students living in nearby counties who could commute from home to campus. Although it no longer follows this practice, some preference will be given next year to students who live in rural areas or attend high schools that normally do not send any students to the campus, said Robert L. Bailey, Berkeley’s director of admissions and records.

Although some of those who apply to Berkeley do not meet the minimum eligibility requirements, many far exceed them. Bailey noted, for example, that 3,500 students with grade-point averages of 3.9 and above were turned away last year, either because they were applying to such highly competitive fields as engineering or because their test scores were significantly below those of other applicants.

“When I talk to parents (about UCLA), I say, ‘Yes, it’s true. We turn away students with 4.0 averages. Last year we turned down about 500 students with 4.0s in the College of Letters and Science,’ ” UCLA’s Siporin said. “When I say that, you can hear a pin drop. Their hearts stop beating. But what they don’t understand and what we keep trying to tell everyone is that we admit plenty of students with less than 4.0s too. Grades are not the only thing we look at. There are a whole host of factors.”

One factor that is very clearly taken into consideration is race--surely the single most controversial aspect of UC’s admissions process.

By any measure, a black or Latino student has a far better chance of being admitted to UC than does a white student. Last year, at UCLA, for example, only about one in three eligible white students were admitted, whereas virtually every black and every Latino who met the university’s basic eligibility requirements was invited to enroll.

“Calls from irate parents suggest that there is a general impression in the community that these students are not qualified. That is simply not the case,” Siporin said.

By law, no more than 6% of the students in a freshman class on each campus can be admitted without meeting the university’s basic eligibility requirements--that is, by completing the prescribed high school courses and ranking in the top 12% of their graduating class in test scores and grade-point average. While minorities make up part of that group, so do a number of other categories of students that the university wants to accommodate--athletes, talented artists and musicians and older students returning to college, for example.

On the whole, the overwhelming majority of minorities have to meet the same basic requirements as other students.

“It is true that blacks and Latinos score lower and get lower grades,” Siporin said. “But the difference,” she contends, “is not as great as some people would like to believe.”

Out of a possible score of 1,600 on the SATs (math and verbal scores combined), whites admitted to UCLA averaged 1,162, blacks averaged 917 and Latinos 950. On a 4.0-GPA scale, blacks admitted to UCLA had an average of 3.33, Latinos 3.50 and whites 3.78.

The patterns are similar at Berkeley, where whites averaged 1,244 on the SAT, Latinos 1,040 and blacks 971. On the grade-point scale, the white average was 3.86, compared to 3.37 for blacks and 3.58 for Latinos.

“When one considers that test scores are correlated most closely with income and the size of one’s family, rather than a student’s prospect for success in college, and that minority students rarely have the same educational advantages that Caucasian students have, you begin to understand why these differences are not only of little relevance but quite inflammatory if one were to put much emphasis on them,” Siporin said.

What the university has had to emphasize is its obligation, mandated by the state, to provide educational opportunities for minorities whatever their qualifications. By 1990, the Legislature has said, the proportion of minorities enrolled at UC should equal their share of California’s public high school graduating classes--which stood in 1985 at 27.8, according to the latest figures from the California Postsecondary Education Commission.

The problem for UC has been finding enough minority students who meet the eligibility requirements. In contrast to white high school graduates, 15.5% of whom are eligible for UC, only 4.9% of Latinos and 3.6% of blacks meet the basic requirements, according to the commission’s latest survey, done in 1983.

One of the most troubling aspects of these figures, according to the commission, is that the proportion of blacks qualifying for admission appears to be declining rather than increasing, not only in California but nationally as well. As a result, UC President David P. Gardner appointed a task force this fall to look into the reasons for the decline and determine what UC can do about it.

Earlier, Gardner set up a task force on the learning problems of “linguistic minorities” and has provided small grants to faculty members to find new ways to improve the language skills of those students.

At the other six UC campuses, the minority share of the freshman classes ranged from 10% to 13%, according to figures compiled by UC’s central administration.

Asian students, who are not considered under-represented, contend that they have taken the brunt of these affirmative-action efforts. Groups representing Asians both from the university and the community at large have mounted campaigns during the last two years, calling for increased Asian enrollment in the UC system.

At Berkeley, a group of Asian critics has even lodged a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice, charging that Asians are being subjected to discrimination in the admissions process.