Controversial Texas Top 10% Rule

Prism123
Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:00:46 +0000

Not coming from texas nor having applied to any schools in texas, my opinion may be relatively unbiased, I think the rule does have some merit as it helps out those in worse backgrounds, however that said it does hurt those in competitive school districts and probably brings down the average level of achievement of UT Austins student body, since lower achieving students at less competitive schools get in over higher achieving students at more competitive schools.

The main problem with the current rule is probably that as populations increase 10% is more and more people and in recent years has taken up such a large percentage of Austins and A&Ms student body leaving so few spots left for general competition. This could be solved by instead of having it always be 10% they could vary the percent so the same number of students fall under the rule from year to year, and so that it is a good deal less students than it has been the past few years. This way the top students at poorer high schools will still get the opportunity to go to an excellent school, but more spots will be open for general competition so they can take more good out of state students and high achieving in staters.