We have been posting about UC admissions including the various services promising to reveal the secrets of UC's decision process. The fact that the process at each campus is opaque undoubtedly costs the university public support. While you could argue that UC procedures are not more opaque than, say, Stanford's, UC is a public institution.
Below is a recent opinion piece expressing frustration with UC admissions.
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The UC admissions process is secretive and uneven. Here’s how to fix it
By Paul Gardiner, San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 2026
University of California admissions decisions are out. Some 200,000 applicants and their families are finally seeing the results of a process whose rules are unwritten, whose scoring is secret, and whose outcomes can be difficult to explain.
The admissions process should be redesigned around the following four key principles.
First, transparency. The UCs should publish exactly the algorithm that they use to evaluate applicants and each applicant should see how their application was scored. Admissions offices tend to speak in reverential terms about using the current “comprehensive review” process to shape an incoming class, as if they were organizing an intimate dinner party, but the process is so arbitrary that it annually turns up stories of students with near-perfect records, typically Asian, who get rejected while apparently inferior candidates are accepted. In reality, UC Santa Barbara, a middle-tier UC, receives 110,000 applications, of which it accepts 42,000 and enrolls 5,000. There is no shaping going on. This is a numbers game.
There is an ongoing debate about what the goals of the admissions process should be.
The current merit-influenced system accounts for family background by factoring in a student’s high school, which serves as a proxy for race and ethnicity, the consideration of which California voters have prohibited. Some would prefer a purely merit-based system. Others believe that, as a public university system, the UC should offer every minimally qualified student an equal shot — a lottery, in other words.
I don’t want to take sides in that debate. I just want to argue that the process should be transparent. No sane person would come up with our current income tax system but it has been assembled over time by majority support and its transparency enables you to calculate your tax exactly. Every applicant should be able to calculate their admission score using whatever process the UCs define.
Second, UC admissions offices should have to demonstrate the value of every element of how applications are scored. The application should not require students to submit anything unless it has predictive value for student success. A student’s academic record meets this standard. Portfolios required by Art and Music programs probably do, too. But do essays predict student success when many are now written by AI? Do lists of extracurriculars identify special talents or just result in shameless self-promotion?
Third, admissions offices must evaluate an applicant’s academic records accurately. High school transcripts have become unreliable due to grade inflation. At UC San Diego, one in 12 freshmen has math skills below middle school level. One quarter of students in remedial math had entered the school with a 4.0 grade average in math, and some of them had completed calculus. Thousands of applicants were proficient in math but UCSD was unable to identify them or chose not to admit them.
Accurate assessment requires external calibration. The UCs could do this themselves: if a high school repeatedly sends students with 4.0 GPAs who can’t do middle school math, admissions officers should calculate a credibility-adjusted GPA for future applicants from that school. As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Better calibration would come from AP exam scores. Ninety percent of UC-eligible students attend schools that offer AP courses. Seventy percent of students who take any AP exams take at least one in 10th or 11th grade. The UCs already use AP scores for class placement after admission and they award so much college credit based on them that high scorers can graduate in three years instead of four. Students who score 5 on the AP exam are stronger than those who score 1, even if both got an A in the associated high school class. But Admissions considers only the class grade.
Fourth, UC admissions officials should be explicit about background and context adjustments for applicants. The UCs have a policy called “eligibility in the local context” that guarantees UC admission to eligible applicants who are in the top 9% of their graduating classes. It is clear who is eligible for this adjustment. But it is not clear how this factors into admissions decisions given that each campus makes its admissions decisions independently.
Each UC favors local applicants but they are not specific about where each UC draws its boundaries and how much of a boost local applicants receive. They adjust for the range of classes offered at a high school but don’t say how they measure this nor what adjustment results.
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PS: For the record, the "photo" above is AI-generated.
