Posted on 10/06/2005 10:22:37 AM PDT by BurbankKarl
The New Admission System: Under the UW's new "holistic" system, each student application will be reviewed by two staff readers. They will rank students as: deny; marginal; admissible; strong; or highest recommendation, also assigning them a number between one and nine. In cases when the two staff assessments greatly diverge, a third, senior reader will give a final assessment.
What it will take to get in: A "highest recommendation," for example, would be a student that has "exceptional academic preparation" or "unique talents, perspectives or backgrounds" that would contribute to the university community, said Philip Ballinger, the UW's director of admissions.
Readers will also separately evaluate a student's academic and personal qualities to help distinguish between closely rated students. Senior university admissions staff will make the final decision on who makes the cut, Ballinger said.
The old admission system: The UW has been using the Admissions Index to admit about half of its students. The index uses a formula which gives about three-quarters weighting to a student's GPA and the remainder to the student's score on the SAT or ACT test. Students are given a numerical rank between 1 and 99.
What it took to get in: The state stipulates that students must get a minimum 28 on the index to be allowed admission at the UW or WSU. But because UW admissions are increasingly more competitive, the university has traditionally set a much higher bar — this year it was 70 — for automatic admission. A student got that score with, for example, a grade-point average of 3.5 and a SAT score of 1420; or, under another scenario, a GPA of 3.8 and a SAT score of 1110.
The UW is also getting rid of its internal "grid" system which ranked students who scored less than a 70 on the Admissions Index. The grid system assigned specific points to factors such as academic performance, socioeconomic background and extracurricular activities such as athletics.
Source: University of Washington
Ah. Looking evangelicals and conservatives no doubt.
Translation: Here's our new system to exclude Asians and Caucasians from our publicly-financed schools.
Under the UW's new "holistic" system,
Education has always subjected itself to fads and fashions and that is because they are incompetent in what they are really suppose to be doing.
TRUE MEANING:
1. Are you a conservative?
2. Do you vote conservative?
3. Are you gay, want to be gay, hope to be gay, sometimes practice being gay, love gays?
If you answered Yes to 1 or 2 above, admission DENIED. If you answered Yes to 3 above, WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSITY OF WA.
-Eric
Funny post.
I thought I'd add my 2 cents here. I'm currently a doctoral student at UW. While I see plenty of left-leaning groups around campus, none of them seem to hold much power.
I'm an older student and when I think of what went on at UMichigan when I was an undergrad there in the early 70s, there is no comparison. These folks couldn't even get up a good anti-war protest before the Iraq invasion. Just a few disaffected faculty and students hanging out while everyone walked around them, ignoring them. I was in anti-war protests in the 70s and these people don't have a clue and don't have the influence that they did years ago.
Each term, when the student groups recruit, you can always find the College Republicans (back in 2001 they told me they were the largest student group on campus, I don't know if that's still true), Christian and Jewish groups, and the ROTC kids seem to be able to walk around in their uniforms w/o hassle.
Yeah, UW is in left-of-Lenin Seattle, but the students come from all over and it seems like a good number of them are bringing their conservative beliefs with them.
Ah, but that is the beauty of the new plan. Under the old system, too many of those "undesirables" were admitted because their merit was undeniable. Under the new plan it will be much easier for the admissions committee, which almost certainly has no champions of conservative ideals, to engage in whatever discriminatory practices they wish, with little or no oversight. With a little bit of collusion between like-minded individuals, anything goes...
I like the bit about social adversity.
Gee - I thought a university's mission was to be both an engine of learning and a bastion of knowledge!
The university may be instituting these policies for an entirely different reason. Consider this:
Universities (and education in general) are great cash cows for those running them. They soak money from every sector of society--private, state, and federal. The more students they enroll the bigger their empire grows and the more money they take in. So how do you enroll more students at the university level? Easy--you just drop your standards (and tell every high school student that they need to go to college).
One approach is to do exactly what UW et.al. are doing--enroll students that have no business going to college and wrap it up in a fuzzy process called "Holistic Assessment". That way you don't have to admit that you're taking advantage of people that likely will not graduate while soaking up the money their enrollment brings in.
If UW moved any further left, they're going to fall off into the ocean, being shoved over the edge by SU right behind them.
Oh yeah.
This is just another way to exclude those most likely to resist their marxist indoctrination.
Isn't it amazing how Libs choose to just ignore the will of the people, and break the law, when it doesn't fit into their viewpoint? They are doing the same thing in CA with Prop 209. After all, they know so much better than us little people who still believe in God and country.
RH: that is certainly good to hear. I work in downtown Seattle, in a leftist law firm. Believe me, there is NO shortage of communist, lefties, homosexuals in this office.
LOL.
I'm curious as to how this will all shake out. As I read it, they are ending the automatic admissions policy. I used to work in law school admissions and we had something similar - get a high enough GPA and LSAT and we didn't even bother reading the rest of your materials.
I think, for a big state school, this holistic approach will take the admissions process a long time. They just can't do an indepth analysis of the thousands of applications they get each year.
I have no problem w/looking at the whole student. Most smaller schools do it routinely. And I will assume that the larger schools do it with the middle of the road applicants, as we did in the law school. You need to read thru the file to see if you want to take a chance on a student who doesn't present the right numbers.
But I betcha they are not going to stop admitting highly qualified students of whatever ideological stripe. You can't run a Research I school w/a bunch of basketweavers and if your competent computer sci or business students are a bit more to the right (I'm engaging in wholesale stereotyping here), I'm thinking they'll still get in.
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