The University of California has said that it made no changes to its admissions procedures that would explain why it accepted fewer students with low SAT scores last year than in 2003. Last year, the university came under criticism from one of its own regents, who argued that administrators were accepting too many unqualified students.
An analysis by the Los Angeles Times released earlier this month — before the most recent admission numbers for next fall were available — showed that UC campuses admitted 2,200 fewer applicants with scores of 1000 or below in 2004 than in 2003, a drop of 26.6 percent.
However, UC Office of the President spokeswoman Ravi Poorsina denied that the university has changed its criteria, saying “external factors fluctuate the outcomes of how the freshman class will look from year to year.”
Assistant Vice Chancellor of Admissions and Enrollment Services Mae W. Brown said there are significant reasons to explain the discrepancy in admission statistics from 2003 to 2004.
“The fee hike in California public universities last year reduced in- and out-of-state applicants,” Brown said. “Also, international students faced increased costs in purchasing student visas, which resulted in an admission drop throughout all groups of students.”
UCSD, for example, showed a five-percent overall drop last year in applicants as a result of fee hikes caused by state budget cuts during 2004.
To adjust to these challenges, UC campuses became more selective in admission procedures due to the limited number of spaces available.
Another reason university officials admitted students with higher SAT scores last year was because students had a more competitive edge in 2004, with an average score of 1210 compared to 1197 in 2003, according to Poorsina.
In 2004, 51 percent of applicants with SAT scores of 1000 or below were accepted, as opposed to 63 percent the year before, the report showed. There was also a small increase in acceptances for students scoring 1400 and above on the SAT exam.
UC Regent John J. Moores released a report in late 2003 criticizing UC Berkeley for admitting nearly 400 students with SAT scores of 600 to 1000.
Last March, in an article written for Forbes magazine, he accused the university of admitting low-scoring students as a way to get around the state’s ban on affirmative action.
Moores told the Times that he is happy that the UC system has taken a stand against admitting below-average SAT scorers because, he said, the university is “victimizing these kids by admitting them with low scores.”
Calls to Moores’ consulting firm were not returned.
Critics have charged that the 2002 “comprehensive review” policy, which factors in students’ hardships and awards extra consideration to first-generation college applicants, is a way of admitting more minorities who do not score well on the SAT.
Brown denied that the university favors underrepresented minorities.
She said campus administrators “follow the guidelines approved by the faculty” and that readers of applications can’t determine applicants’ ethnicity, gender or national origin during selection.
She also said that 77 percent of comprehensive review is based on academics, which “includes high school grades, honors classes and test scores, as well as community service.”
“We place greater weight on the four years students are in high school where they are taking difficult courses than we do on one test like the SAT,” Brown said.
The newspaper’s analysis and the university’s critics have focused only on criteria used for admissions, Poorsina said.
“The main point is that critics and studies revealed by the Los Angeles Times look at SAT scores alone and seem to question our criteria, as though we are bringing less-qualified students to the UC system,” she said. “We must take into consideration that there will be fluctuations from year to year where, for example, there will sometimes be more highly qualified students — but we have never deliberately changed our criteria.”
