PERSPECTIVE ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION : How Race Adds Up for UCLA Entry : An intricate ranking system excludes 350 white and Asian applicants a year from the university.

What group do you belong to? The UCLA admissions office wants to know. Are you in Group I--”American Indian, African-American or Mexican-American/Chicano/Chicana”? In Group II, other “Latino/Latina American”? Group III, “Pilipino/Pilipina American”? Or Group IV, “All Others,” which includes whites and non-Filipino Asians?

If you’re a high school student applying to UCLA, your group number can be critical because race is one of the most important factors in determining admission. Here’s how it works, according to a UCLA internal document.

First, you get an “academic rank,” based on your SAT scores, your GPA and a few other academic factors. In UCLA’s system, academic rank goes from 1, the best, down to 6.

Everyone with an academic rank of 2.5 or better gets in automatically. For others, admission depends on “supplemental rank.”

Your supplemental rank starts out based on your “disadvantage level.” To determine this, the university looks at your parents’ income, your parents’ education, your disabilities and some other factors. The most disadvantaged students are at 1, the least disadvantaged at 5. (A slightly different scale is used for non-California residents.)

The more disadvantaged you are, the better your chances of getting in, even with a marginal academic ranking. If your supplemental rank is 1, you get in automatically if your academic rank is as bad as 4.5. If your supplemental rank is 5, you automatically get in only if you have an academic rank of 2.5 or better.

These are all unobjectionable criteria. So far, we have a picture of college admissions that many might like. A student with poor, illiterate parents and an academic rank of 3.5 may in fact be smarter than the child of rich, college-educated parents who has an academic rank of 2.5.

But here’s where things get trickier. Now, the UCLA admissions officer looks at your application and asks:

* Are you in Group I (American Indian, black, or Mexican American)? If so, you advance by up to three disadvantage levels. In other words, if you started at Level 5 (“virtually no disadvantage”), being in Group I moves you up to Level 2 (“high disadvantage”). If you started at Levels 4, 3 or 2, being in Group I now moves you up to Level 1. Thus, the main beneficiaries here are the least disadvantaged Group I members because the most disadvantaged ones are already at or near Level 1.

* Are you in Group II (other Latino)? If so, you advance up to two disadvantage levels: Level 5s move up to Level 3 (“substantial disadvantage”), Level 4s move up to Level 2, and everyone else moves up to Level 1.

* Are you in Group III (Filipino)? If you are, you move up one level.

* Are you in Group IV (white or non-Filipino Asian)? You stay where you are.

Some people think that the race-conscious admissions process uses race as atie-breaker, as a grounds for making tough decisions that would otherwise be too close to call. But we’re not talking tie-breakers here. We’re not even talking about looking at race, on an individual basis, as one of many factors that might make an applicant more desirable. We’re talking about race as one of the most important factors.

The up to three-level advantage you’d get for being black is generally higher (sometimes much higher) than the break you’d get for being deaf or blind. A child of rich, college-educated Mexican-American parents would get a slightly better supplemental rank than a child of dirt-poor white or Asian parents who never finished high school.

The ranking system is different for and harder on non-residents: All applicants in Group I get a disadvantage level of 3 (“substantial disadvantage”), regardless of how rich they may be. And all applicants in Group IV get a disadvantage level of 6 (handicapping them more than the least disadvantaged of the California residents), even if they are the poorest of the poor.

What’s the result? A University of California study recently looked at what would happen to UCLA if the admissions office stopped considering race and focused only on academics and socioeconomic disadvantage.

The numbers were striking: Asians today are 42% of the UCLA freshman class. If their race wasn’t considered (but socioeconomic disadvantage still was), they’d be at 47% to 48%. Whites are at 28%. If race wasn’t taken into account, they’d be at 32% to 35%. Do a bit of subtraction, and you see that 10% of the students who’d otherwise be in the entering class--about 350 students every year--are rejected because of the race-conscious admission program.

The California Board of Regents will meet Thursday to discuss race preferences in UC admissions. Maybe the regents should think hard about the cold mathematical reality of what UCLA is doing: admission by the numbers, with race--race number I, race number II, race number III or race number IV--one of the most critical numbers of them all.