Remember all the uproar over the discovery that UC-Berkeley was admitting students with bottom-feeder SAT scores? (Well, it created an uproar in the blogosphere, anyway.) Now there's a report wondering if UCLA was doing the same thing as well:
UCLA turned away over 1,000 students with high SAT scores in 2002 and admitted several hundred students with comparatively low SAT scores that same year, according to a report compiled by the university and released on Tuesday...
Although UCLA's admissions statistics for 2002 followed the same general trend as Berkeley's, there were notable differences between the two. For example, although UCLA admitted fewer students with SAT scores between 1500 and 1600 than did Berkeley, Berkeley also had twice as many applicants with near-perfect scores.
Overall, UCLA admitted nearly five times as many students with near-perfect scores as it denied, whereas Berkeley admitted twice as many as it denied.
The grade point averages of students admitted to UCLA also rose more directly with SAT scores. Students with high SAT scores who were denied admittance generally had lower GPAs...
This comes as no surprise to those who support "comprehensive review" and all the campuses that use it as part of admissions procedures. Allegedly, the SAT I is the least predictive of the usual triad - SAT I, SAT II and high school GPA - and so the UCLA statement presents this finding to explain their disavowal of the importance of the SAT.
However, if a school says, "The SAT I is not predictive for our applicants, therefore, we will use some other factor X in admissions," then I expect to see data showing that Factor X is more predictive of success than the SAT I. If UCLA uses mainly high school GPA and the SAT II because those are more predictive of success, more power to 'em.
But if UCLA admits students with low grades, or low test scores, based mainly on "life experiences," they're as much as admitting that they don't really care what factors are predictive, because there's no evidence to suggest that having, or overcoming, a rough childhood is predictive of success in college. The universities are using one set of rules to damn the SAT, and another set of rules for deciding which touchy-feely measures are given weight in the admissions process.
If I thought that the UC admissions offices really cared about the applicant qualities that are predictive of college success, as opposed to the qualities that will allow UC to bend the rules and admit a lot more minorities regardless of acadedmic qualifications, I'd take their comments about the SAT I more seriously.
(Found via Professor Bainbridge .)
Posted by kswygert at October 23, 2003 11:39 AM