MEDIA ADVISORY

Subject: Comprehensive Review

By a vote of its systemwide Assembly of the Academic Senate today (Oct. 31), the University of California faculty gave its support to a proposal for "comprehensive review" in UC admissions.

The vote was 42-0, with three abstentions. The Assembly met at the UCLA campus.

The next step for the comprehensive review proposal is a vote by the UC Board of Regents, which is expected at the board's Nov. 14-15 meeting at UC San Francisco-Laurel Heights. The Regents held a preliminary discussion of comprehensive review at their Oct. 17 meeting.

Under comprehensive review, students would still become eligible for the UC system in the same ways they currently do - based on their high school grades and standardized test scores, or on the basis of being in the top 4 percent of the class at their high school. All UC-eligible students are guaranteed admission to at least one UC campus.

Comprehensive review would, however, change the way in which campuses select their students from the UC-eligible pool, allowing all students to be considered on the basis of a single, comprehensive set of selection criteria. Academic accomplishments would still be stressed, but the current "tiered" system of admissions - in which 50-75 percent of the class must be admitted solely on the basis of specified academic criteria, and the remaining students are admitted on the basis of those academic criteria plus other supplemental criteria - would disappear.

The Academic Assembly is the legislative body of the universitywide Academic Senate and is composed of faculty representing each UC campus. Assembly members include the chairs of the nine campus divisions, chairs of major universitywide Senate committees, and representatives appointed or elected in proportion to the number of Senate members in each division.

The text of the faculty recommendation for comprehensive review is available on the Academic Senate's web site at:

http://www.ucop.edu/senate/assembly/oct2001/oct2001viib.pdf

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