By Noah Grand
Daily Bruin Reporter
The UC system-wide Academic Senate unanimously approved comprehensive review in their meeting at UCLA Wednesday.
The proposal, which sets a framework for considering UC applicants in terms of academics, personal achievement and life challenges, must be approved by the UC Regents in November before being finalized.
“This is a historic occasion that the assembly unanimously affirmed this,” said Chand Viswanathan, the system-wide Academic Senate Chair. “It shows that the senate is very strongly committed to comprehensive review.”
Comprehensive review is intended to look at all aspects of an application instead of making decisions based solely on academics. It is also expected to help socioeconomically disadvantaged students, who generally have lower high school GPAs and test scores.
If approved by the regents, individual campuses must still decide how they are going to implement the new system of admissions.
“We set up the criteria to try and give campuses as much latitude as possible in making decisions,” said Dorothy Perry, chair of the Board on Admissions and Relations with Schools.
The biggest question about comprehensive review is funding. The state legislature provided $750,000 in the budget for implementing comprehensive admissions, but Viswanathan said he was not sure how much the program would cost.
Further budget concerns were raised after Gov. Gray Davis asked all state agencies to prepare what they would do if their budget was cut by 15 percent. UC President Richard Atkinson dismissed these concerns.
“I do not think that funding is a major issue,” Atkinson said in a presentation to the Academic Senate, adding that he was negotiating budget cuts.
“There will be some cuts, but they will not be as serious as 15 percent,’ Atkinson said.
The final cost of comprehensive review depends on how individual campuses decide to implement the program and how many readers are required.
“If it is required to read every application twice, that would break the back of some of UC’s admissions offices,” said Evelyn Silvia, a member of the UC Davis Academic Senate, explaining how the offices could not handle a more thorough reading of applications.
While the Academic Senate agreed on the new admissions framework, there remained many questions about the use of specific admissions criteria. Perry said each campus is free to determine how much weight they give to specific criteria, but academic achievement should be considered the most important.
Concerns were raised over comprehensive admissions reducing the quality of the UC student body. Quality has traditionally been measured by test scores and high school GPA, but some supporters of comprehensive review favor a new definition of quality that also considers an applicant’s personal achievement and life challenges.
Even under comprehensive review, the criteria for UC eligibility – a formula considering an applicant’s high school GPA and SAT scores – will not change.
“We do believe we will be able to maintain, if not improve, the quality of students we admit,” Perry said.
UCLA is planning on having two readers rank an applicant’s academic criteria and having one reader rank the applicant’s personal achievements and life challenges, according to Tom Lifka, interim director of admissions.
BOARS worked on the proposal with help from Academic Senate committees at each UC campus throughout the summer after the regents passed RE-28 in May, which repealed SP-1 and gave the Academic Senate control over admissions subject to the regents’ approval.
Comprehensive admissions eliminates the two-tiered system of admissions instituted in 1995 when the regents passed SP-1, a policy that banned affirmative action in admissions.
Between 50 and 75 percent of admissions decisions had to be made using academic criteria under SP-1.