UC Admissions Criteria Skewed

Controversy has swirled around the University of California’s decision in the wake of Proposition 209 to end affirmative action in favor of entirely merit-based admissions. Opponents have challenged the university’s use of merit-based testing--the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT)--arguing that it excludes minorities. Should the university end the use of the SAT in determining admission? Before deciding to abandon merit-based evaluation systems, the university should have to demonstrate that it has a merit-based system.

This summer, UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Law School acknowledged that the grade-point average (GPA) of an applicant is “adjusted� based upon Boalt’s ranking of the applicant’s undergraduate school. Applicants from schools ranked above 78 get their GPAs adjusted up; those from colleges ranked below 72 get their GPAs adjusted down.

The system brought immediate criticism on the basis that schools that attract disproportionate numbers of minority students--state universities, for example--got low rankings, while prestigious Eastern universities were awarded high rankings. Is the grade adjustment fair and accurate, or does it penalize students who, for financial and cultural reasons, are more likely to attend state schools?

Compare the following two students: Student X grew up in a family in which education was valued. Both parents graduated from college. English was the language spoken at home. She was a good student, placing in the top 1% to 2% on standardized tests. Her parents were happy to pay for her education and could afford to do so. She went to an Ivy League college and did well. She got into a highly ranked law school.

Student Y grew up in a household where English was not spoken. His parents were first-generation Americans. He lived at home during college, working 20 to 30 hours a week at various jobs and an additional 10 to 15 hours a week helping his father, a truck driver. He was a student of exceptional ability. He was smart, articulate and hard-working. He wrote exams of astonishing quality, both in the content of his analysis and the caliber of his writing. His undergraduate GPA was 3.9 of a possible 4.0. He was not only the first in his family to graduate from college, he was the first in his family to go to college. He aced the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), ranking in the top 1% to 2%. (I’m not making this up; this is a real person.) He hopes to go to law school.

By all rational measures, Student Y has outperformed Student X. But not by Boalt’s measure: Because Student X earned her A’s at Dartmouth (an 87 on the Boalt scorecard) and Student Y earned his A’s at Cal State Northridge (a 67), Student X’s GPA would be raised while Student Y’s would be lowered. Mind you, I’ve got nothing against Student X; in fact, I was Student X. But it is not false modesty to say that while I was a strong student, Student Y was a brilliant student.

Why is Boalt’s system skewed? In the first place, it will be impossible for any CSUN student to achieve a perfect GPA of 4.0. Even if they earn it in college, it will be reduced by Boalt.

What is the basis for the ranking? Boalt considers the college’s average SAT score for entering freshmen along with the frequency of the applicant’s GPA at the college. This is apparently an attempt to gauge the caliber of the institution and its grading standards. But it’s a system that caters to private, elite colleges at the expense of state schools. The SATs of students entering Dartmouth will be distributed on a narrow band. It is difficult to get into Ivy League schools, and they take only those who perform at very high levels. The SATs of students entering CSUN, however, will be spread along a broader band, because the California State University system has undertaken to admit all students in the top third of their high school classes. This includes many who would have no chance of getting into an elite college, but also a lot who could have. Why go to a state school if you can get into the Ivies? Students who have less money, who are more reluctant to leave ethnically and racially diverse communities or who need to live with and help families are going to go to local public schools, even if they’re brilliant enough to have gone to Yale. For that matter, students less familiar with the college pecking order are not going to care about relative ranks of colleges in places they’ve never been.

That students will be evaluated based on their own test performance is one thing; but under Boalt’s practices, they are penalized for how other students performed.

What about the second part of the equation? How do the rankings reflect grading standards? Boalt offers no guidance, but I’d love to see a breakdown. In my department at CSUN, only 10% of students get a grade of A or A-minus. An A, in other words, is really an A. The prestige schools, on the other hand, are notorious for grade inflation.

Finally, there ought to be some way of factoring the difficulty of the student’s achievement. If Olympic judges can award points based on the difficulty of a swimmer’s dive or a skater’s jump, why can’t Boalt Hall? It seems to me that Student Y has performed exceptionally on an inward 1 1/2 with a twist while Student X pretty much did a straight dive. Without even getting to the issue of affirmative action, it seems that Boalt has unnecessarily handicapped students from diverse backgrounds. If the University of California wants a system of admitting students purely on merit, then let them institute one. They sure haven’t yet.