@Gumbymom What would be the purpose of UCB’s Augmented Review, i.e. what circumstances trigger an invitation to submit LORs?
What is supplemental application review? Isn’t that an audit of the veracity of the contents of the application?
Unlike some top schools, the challenge at Cal is not only to get in but get through. If an applicant is admitted through favor or fraud, that person had better actually get their degree. Taking a spot from a more eligible applicant (eligible as defined in the “holistic” approach Cal employs) and subsequently dropping out or being drummed out because of an inability to handle the rigor is doubly galling.
Were Blum’s LORs written in response to an invitation from UCB? Were the students he endorsed determined to be unqualified academically?
I would think that if he wrote an LOR in response from an invitation, the student who received the invitation would have been responsible to ensure that the LOR got to the right people.
I’m not really sure whether I think Blum did anything wrong here. Maybe he was just misguided. Without more details, it’s hard to say.
If I’m reading this right, Blum wrote a LOR, which may or may not have violated a rule. Who knows, he may have been a golfing buddy of the chancellor. We don’t know.
Much ado about nothing.
As I wrote on th other thread. While there are serious issues with the athletes, since they were accepted under false pretenses, the 42 who were accepted, possibly because of extra recommendations are pretty minor, and really cannot be said to have taken anybody else’s place.
Again, as I wrote on another thread, in the period that the audit covers, the universities accepted more than 400,000 students. This is 0.01% - these colleges make larger errors when calculating yield every year.
Moreover, the only students that was attributed to Blum was on the waiting list, so we’re not talking about somebody who was deemed as being unsuitable. It also means that the students was not accepted in the place of somebody who would have been accepted directly.
From the UCB website:
Reasons for UCB’s LOR request are similar to the other campus’ supplemental review criteria, however many very competitive/top applicants have been targeted for LOR’s (Regents/Chancellor scholarship applicants).
Other campuses will also do a supplemental/augmented review on some applicants.
Augmented review by the UC’s.
https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/governance/policies/2110.html
**The Augmented Review pool should be limited in size to no more than 15 percent of all applicants.
The criteria for referring an applicant for Augmented Review include the following:
- Evidence of focus on an area of special talent which may have limited a student’s time to participate in a broader range of activities.
- Evidence of character traits that imply a strong likelihood of making a significant contribution to campus life.
- Evidence of significant academic achievement or the potential for academic achievement at the University in spite of extraordinary or compound disadvantage or learning difference, or physical disability or other unusual circumstances.
- Evidence of significant improvement in the academic record accompanied by one or both of the following: (1) reasons for the initial poor performance; and (2) sustained and in-depth participation in educational outreach programs, which demonstrate the applicant’s commitment to succeed academically within a challenging environment.
- Evidence of relative lack of access to, counseling about, or support to take college preparatory, honors, Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) classes or required college entrance examinations.**
And they were already on the waitlist? Jail and fine Blum. ??
I thought I read in the newspaper a UCB applicant was initially rejected and then was admitted after Blum’s recommendation letter.
Blum’s letters outside the normal process were not the only findings. There were also some “fake athletes” as well as some other irregularities relating to admission of applicants with poor admissions reading scores but associated with donors. Blum may be getting attention because he is named, but some of the other instances were arguably bigger.
There are also complaints about admission reader inconsistency (e.g. some admissions readers are “hard graders” and others are “easy graders”), which is likely a problem with any system that relies on subjective admissions reading, regardless of whether or not anything against the rules was done.