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More transparency in the admissions process would benefit applicants to UC Berkeley and the entire University of California system.<\/p>\n
Yalonda M. James\/S.F. Chronicle<\/p>\n
University of California admissions decisions<\/a> are out. Some 200,000 applicants and their families are finally seeing the results of a process whose rules are unwritten, whose scoring is secret, and whose outcomes can be difficult to explain.<\/p>\n The admissions process should be redesigned around the following four key principles.<\/p>\n First, transparency. The UCs should publish exactly the algorithm that they use to evaluate applicants and each applicant should see how their application was scored. Admissions offices tend to speak in reverential terms about using the current \u201ccomprehensive review\u201d process to shape an incoming class<\/a>, as if they were organizing an intimate dinner party, but the process is so arbitrary that it annually turns up stories of students with near-perfect records,\u00a0typically Asian<\/a>, who get rejected while apparently inferior candidates are accepted. In reality, UC Santa Barbara, a middle-tier UC, receives 110,000 applications, of which it accepts 42,000 and enrolls 5,000. There is no shaping going on. This is a numbers game.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n There is an ongoing debate about what the goals of the admissions process should be.\u00a0<\/p>\n The current merit-influenced system accounts for family background by factoring in a student\u2019s high school, which serves as a proxy for race and ethnicity, the consideration of which California voters have prohibited. Some would prefer a purely merit-based system. Others believe that, as a public university system, the UC should offer every minimally qualified student an equal shot\u00a0\u2014 a lottery, in other words.\u00a0<\/p>\n San Francisco Chronicle Logo<\/p>\n Make us a Preferred Source to get more of our news when you search.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n I don\u2019t want to take sides in that debate. I just want to argue that the process should be transparent. No sane person would come up with our current income tax system but it has been assembled over time by majority support and its transparency enables you to calculate your tax exactly. Every applicant should be able to calculate their admission score using whatever process the UCs define.<\/p>\n Second, UC admissions offices should have to demonstrate the value of every element of how applications are scored. The application should not require students to submit anything unless it has predictive value for student success. A student\u2019s academic record meets this standard. Portfolios required by Art and Music programs probably do, too. But do essays predict student success when many are now written by AI? Do lists of extracurriculars identify special talents or just result in shameless self-promotion?\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Third, admissions offices must evaluate an applicant\u2019s academic records accurately. High school transcripts have become unreliable due to grade inflation. At\u00a0UC San Diego, one in 12 freshmen has math skills below middle school level<\/a>. One quarter of students in remedial math had entered the school with a 4.0 grade average in math, and some of them had completed calculus. Thousands of applicants were proficient in math but UCSD was unable to identify them or chose not to admit them.<\/p>\n Accurate assessment requires external calibration. The UCs could do this themselves: if a high school repeatedly sends students with 4.0 GPAs who can\u2019t do middle school math, admissions officers should calculate a credibility-adjusted GPA for future applicants from that school. As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.\u00a0<\/p>\n Better calibration would come from AP exam scores. Ninety percent of\u00a0UC-eligible students attend schools that offer AP courses. Seventy percent of students who take any AP exams take at least one in 10th or 11th grade. The\u00a0UCs already use AP scores for class placement after admission and they award so much college credit based on them that high scorers can graduate in three years instead of four.\u00a0 Students who score 5 on the AP exam are stronger than those who score 1, even if both got an A in the associated high school class. But Admissions considers only the class grade.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fourth, UC admissions officials should be explicit about background and context adjustments for applicants. The UCs have a policy called \u201celigibility in the local context\u201d that guarantees UC admission to eligible applicants who are in the top 9% of their graduating classes. It is clear who is eligible for this adjustment. But it is not clear how this factors into admissions decisions given that each campus makes its admissions decisions independently.\u00a0<\/p>\n Each UC favors local applicants but they are not specific about where each UC draws its boundaries and how much of a boost local applicants receive. They adjust for the range of classes offered at a high school but don\u2019t say how they measure this nor what adjustment results.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.<\/p>\n