UC regents delay action on SAT subject exams

The proposed changes, which would take effect for students hoping to enroll in fall 2012, are intended to help UC applicants who fall short by a technicality or whose high schools do not offer enough UC-required classes or adequate counseling, its backers say.

"A lot of excellent kids are eliminated from consideration on trifling grounds. This would stop that," said UC Santa Barbara education professor Michael Brown, chairman of the UC systemwide Academic Senate. Last month, the faculty group approved the changes after years of study and revision.

Now, the regents' assent is needed but a vote may be delayed for several months to allow new UC President Mark G. Yudof, as well as counselors, alumni and the public, to digest the proposal. Several regents said they were confused by parts of the plan and worried that it could be perceived as lowering standards.

Yudof, in his first regents meeting as president, said he agreed with the plan's goals and its elimination of subject tests. But he also said it was one of the "most consequential" issues facing the governing board. "Every time you change the admissions standards, you have a little bit of unpredictability. So that's why we have to study it very carefully," he said at the board's meeting at UC Santa Barbara.

Under the proposed changes, UC applicants would still be required to take the main SAT exam or the ACT test with a writing section. But UC applicants would no longer have to take two supplemental subject exams in such areas as history or math. Critics of the subject exams say that they add little useful information to applications and that missing the tests is a major reason applicants with otherwise good grades and SAT scores are ineligible for UC.

The plan would also change other ways students become eligible for UC admission and are guaranteed a spot at one of its nine undergraduate campuses, even if not always at the students' first choice. And it would add a new category of applicants: students with slightly lower grades than other applicants, but whose resumes and essays would at least be reviewed for possible admission.