College Admissions

The SAT is to college admission ... " ... As a root canal is to a dentist?" said Peter Lee, 16. He and several other weary-looking high school students had just emerged from a four-hour SAT prep class in Glendale. "As a root canal is to a patient?" suggested Emin Gharibian, 17. Neither of those worked for Anthony Kwon, 16. "As a root canal is to pain," he said. Pain is typically the refrain when college-bound youngsters jaw about the SAT. But some relief is coming.

For 40 years, competitive colleges and universities in the United States have taken race into account in order to increase their enrollment of African Americans (and, to a lesser extent, other minorities). Originally justified as a way to compensate for a long legacy of racial discrimination, and later embraced as a way to provide a more diverse learning environment, affirmative action has been good for the United States. It has made it easier for minorities to enter the educational and professional mainstream without compromising the rigor of American higher education.

Whiz kid Steve Lu was having an off day when he took the SAT at age 9 last year. The high school kids were staring and calling him names like Doogie Howser, and Steve got flustered. Though he scored 710 on the math portion, he knows he can do better. And he refuses to discuss the verbal section, since it was below 700.

Society trusts teachers and school administrators to deliver a lesson arguably more important than reading and math: Cheating is not only forbidden but dishonorable. How discouraging and frustrating it is, then, to discover yet another instance in which an institution itself has been caught violating the rules. On Monday, Claremont McKenna College announced that an official there inflated the SAT scores of incoming students to make the school look good in national rankings, including the overhyped lists published annually in U.S. News & World Report.

High school students, beware! College admissions and financial aid officers in California and elsewhere may be peeking over your digital shoulder at the personal information you post on your Facebook or MySpace page. And they might decide to toss out your application after reading what you wrote about that cool party last week or how you want to conduct your romantic life at college. According to a new report by the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling, about a quarter of U.S.

Some high school seniors may have scoffed at warnings about partying instead of studying this spring. But nagging counselors and parents turn out to have been right: A senior-year slump can have painful repercussions. In June and July, elite universities in California and across the country increasingly are revoking admission offers to students whose grades originally were good enough to gain acceptance but whose final exams and transcripts took a dive into Ds or worse.

Tools for getting into college: GPA, SAT ? and Facebook? The website StudentAdvisor reports at least one case of an applicant being rejected because of something in his or her social media profile. And one interviewer has said she is "absolutely" prejudiced by what she sees online about candidates. "I think it's always better to be safe than sorry," Allison Otis, who conducts interviews for Harvard College, posted in a thread on the website Quora. "When you apply to college you spend such a long time crafting an image through your applications and essays that to be careless about your online data is just silly.

It seems that Yat-pang Au's parents could have given him more assistance in planning his college career. Several other UC campuses have strong engineering programs, not to mention private colleges such as MIT and Stanford. Coming from one of the Bay Area's most exclusive suburbs, why did they leave these options unexplored? Pete Tremblay Manhattan Beach

Re "Why the best schools can't pick the best kids -- and vice versa," Current, March 18 Barry Schwartz may be partly right in that there is no hard science to college admissions, but calling the work I do a crapshoot is offensive. Selective college admissions is about shaping a community. Making admission decisions among thousands of qualified applications for just a few classroom seats is, like a lot of things in life, mostly about gut instinct and life experience. We also consider evidence, both quantifiable and anecdotal, of what works at our institution and build a class that will both benefit from and bring benefit to the campus at large.

Hundreds of students packed UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza on Tuesday to express their views on the use of race and gender in university admissions decisions -- and to weigh in on the tone of the debate. The dialogue in this bastion of the free-speech movement was triggered by a bake sale, sponsored by the Berkeley College Republicans, that promised goods priced according to the buyer's race, ethnicity and gender. The event, met with anger by many students, was timed to counteract a phone bank in support of a bill on Gov. Jerry Brown's desk that would allow the UC and Cal State University systems to consider such factors, as long as no preference was given, in admissions.

"Aarakshan" (Reservation) is a splendid example of how Bollywood's skilled way with melodrama helps make entertaining a lengthy exploration of a very serious and complex issue that has universal resonance. Director Prakash Jha and co-writer Anjum Rajabali set their epic-scale story in the late 1990s, when India's supreme court decreed that 49.5% of college admissions to public institutions be reserved for students from the lower castes. This stirring film boasts but a single song-and-dance number, well integrated early in the film, and several songs on the soundtrack that effectively express "Aarakshan's" concerns.

Michigan's ban on considering race and gender in college admissions was struck down Friday by a federal appeals court, which ruled that the voter-approved law burdens minorities and is unconstitutional. The 2-1 decision overturns Proposal 2, a law passed in 2006 that prohibits the state's public universities from giving "preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. " The measure, which passed with 58% of the vote, forced the University of Michigan and other state schools to change their policies on admissions.

Tools for getting into college: GPA, SAT ? and Facebook? The website StudentAdvisor reports at least one case of an applicant being rejected because of something in his or her social media profile. And one interviewer has said she is "absolutely" prejudiced by what she sees online about candidates. "I think it's always better to be safe than sorry," Allison Otis, who conducts interviews for Harvard College, posted in a thread on the website Quora. "When you apply to college you spend such a long time crafting an image through your applications and essays that to be careless about your online data is just silly.

California's high school seniors faced slightly tougher odds for freshman admission to the University of California this year, and more than 10,700 were offered a spot on one or more of the university's controversial new waiting lists, according to statistics released Wednesday. Susan Wilbur, UC's director of undergraduate admissions, described 2010 as the most competitive admissions cycle in UC history, caused mainly by a budget-related reduction in California freshman enrollment by 10% over two years.

University of California leaders Wednesday apologized to black UC San Diego students for recent racial incidents at the campus and proposed changes in admissions policies aimed at boosting enrollment of minorities across the system. UC President Mark G. Yudof and other UC regents acknowledged that the UC San Diego episodes, including an off-campus student party that mocked Black History Month, has brought attention to the low enrollment of African American students on the campus.

Seeking to increase the ranks of black, Latino and Native American students at the University of California, civil rights activists said they will file a federal lawsuit Tuesday challenging the state law that bans affirmative action in admissions. The suit contends that Proposition 209, which was passed by California voters in 1996, violates equal protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and says it has limited the numbers of non-Asian minority students at UC's most selective campuses.

University of California officials have extended the application period for undergraduate admissions after a computer slowdown kept some students from filing their online applications in time for Monday night's deadline. The new deadline is 11:59 p.m. Tuesday. Susan Wilbur, UC's director of undergraduate admissions, said her office is investigating the cause of the computerized malfunction that at least temporarily blocked some panicked last-minute filers from submitting applications on Sunday and Monday nights.