Dear Editor,
I worked very hard to get into UCSD, and that does not just include doing well in high school, it also includes making sure I fulfilled all of the requirements in order be eligible for admission. So you can imagine my surprise when the UC Board of Regents decided to take up a proposal to eliminate the SAT II as an admissions requirement.
I am not the biggest fan of standardized testing, but my problem lies in the UC Board of Regents’ reasoning. To quote the minutes from the July 16 meeting: ‘Failure to take the required SAT subject tests or complete the ‘a-g’ curriculum properly ‘mdash; which may mean only minor variances ‘mdash; are major reasons for ineligibility, including academically strong students.’ This means that the UC Board of Regents figures, ‘many students are not taking the SAT II who would be eligible if we eliminated it, so let’s eliminate the requirement because some students are not taking it!’
Former U.S. Congressman and UC Berkeley graduate Doug Ose discussed this logic in a recent op-ed. ‘This staggeringly simplistic rationale raises legitimate questions about the wisdom of the regents’ willingness to consider admitting to the UC system students who cannot understand the most fundamental step of entering college which is to apply for it,’ Ose said. ‘The answer is for UC to better communicate its admissions requirements, not eliminate them.’
If students cannot figure out the steps to getting into college, why’ would I want that person as my classmate? They are only going to burden an already overcrowded system. Many students who meet the requirements are already turned away, so why extend an invitation to those who do not meet even the most basic of criteria?
All of this does not even account for how much this new proposal will cost the UC system. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported a loss of $1 billion to the UC endowment and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is discussing millions of dollars in further budget cuts after the endowment has already been butchered once. This proposal will make thousands of more students eligible for admission and each one will require more attention because we will be losing a benchmark for admissions. This is going to create an even greater burden on our already stretched admissions system.
Basically, this proposal is seeking to eliminate admission requirements because applicants do not know about them. The consequences of applying this logic are disastrous. If we applied this backward logic to other things, we would end up with lawyers who think they deserve to get into law school because they did not know about the LSAT. For more information go to www.saveucstandards.com and tell the UC Board of Regents it is out of touch. We do not need to dumb down the admissions process for the finest network of institutions in the country.