Wednesday, April 15, 1998
Community Briefs
Rally will challenge admissions results
To protest the effects of Proposition 209 on minority
admissions, the African Student Union and the UCLA Affirmative
Action Coalition is holding a "Rally for Diversity" on Thursday at
10:30 a.m. in Schoenberg Quad (across from Murphy Hall).
The significant drop in minority admissions for the 1998
freshman class has been a great concern to ASU and other student
groups. In a meeting with Chancellor Carnesale, ASU asked the
administration to refuse to comply with Proposition 209, to which
Carnesale replied that he will "obey the law."
American schools still not up to par
A congressional committee held another hearing at the beginning
of the month to determine what to do about the failure of America’s
students to measure up to the rest of the world in basic science
and math skills.
The hearings were called in part as a result of the Third
International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which showed
that American 12th-graders ranked 18th out of the 21 countries that
participated in the study of math and science literacy.
Since they were released in February, people in and outside
academia have often been put in a position of defending their
education and the system that produced them, and have struggled to
explain the results of the international test and America’s
apparent failure to measure up to the rest of the industrialized
world.
USAC to hold student issues forum
The USAC Internal Vice President’s office will hold a student
issues forum on Thursday, from noon to 1:30 p.m. in Kerckhoff
Hall’s Charles E. Young Grand Salon.
At the last issues forum, representatives from Parking and
Transportation, Capital Programs, the Office of Residential Life,
and the College of Letters and Sciences gathered to take questions
from students on a variety of subjects, ranging from housing issues
to parking to the Instructional Enhancement Initiative.
Scholarship diversity down at UC Berkeley
As a result of the end of affirmative action in the admissions
process, next year’s Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholars will be
chosen from a far less diverse pool of applicants than in recent
years, according to university officials.
The 1,000 potential incoming freshmen selected for interviews
for the scholarships, which are the most prestigious conferred by
the university, are mostly white and Asian-American males, said
Catherine Koshland, chair of UC Berkeley’s Committee of
Undergraduate Scholarships and Honors (CUSH).
"It’s going to be a different composition," Koshland said.
"Among the pool to be interviewed, there were more males than
females and affirmative action classes were not
well-represented."
According to Koshland, the UC Board of Regents’ ban on
affirmative action in the admissions process, which was approved in
July 1995 but delayed until the fall 1998 semester, altered CUSH’s
selection process for interviewees.
Until the ban, CUSH used an academic index system similar to
that used in university admissions, in which test scores and GPA
combined to give a student a certain amount of points.
Koshland said 40 percent of students were automatically accepted
for interviews based on their index scores.
Compiled from Daily Bruin staff and wire reports.