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With this month’s arrival of the Class of 2010 and the news of its dismal lack of diversity, it is fitting that the Daily Bruin address the issue of UCLA’s admissions process and the recent proposal for its reform.

Under the current system, a prospective student’s application is never reviewed in its entirety. Instead, applications are divided into parts, with readers assigned to evaluate each separately. This means that admissions decisions rely on assessments by partially informed – and therefore partially ignorant – readers.

Problems with such a piecemeal approach (“School to adopt UC Berkeley’s ‘holistic’ approach,” News, Sept. 24) will be evident to anyone who has evaluated applicants for any job or leadership position.

An evaluator’s ability to compare candidates is severely limited without access to all available information.

Comprehensive review, on the other hand, is similar to many job application processes in that it considers all of the applicants’ information. Comprehensive review would allow admissions committees to see the range and depth of qualifications that each applicant would bring to the UCLA student body.

Providing committee members with the most complete information possible, as would be done under this new system, is necessary to ensure sound, well-informed admissions decisions.

With respect to Anthony Pesce’s coverage of this admissions policy debate (“Application review may be restructured,” News, Sept. 24), I was disappointed to see a continued dominance of Ward Connerly’s voice on the issue.

Connerly has consistently argued that “problems in education” exist and should be fixed at lower levels.

This framing of the issue obscures the fact that the college admissions process, precisely because it selects who will and will not be given the opportunity to earn a degree, does not reflect but actually perpetuates racial inequality in our society.

Pesce cites Connerly on the rationale for color-blind admissions. “Minority students should earn their place at a university rather than attending based on relaxed standards,” he said.

Following this thread we would have to infer that the current over-representation of Asians and whites and abysmal under-representation of Pilipinos, blacks, Latinos, and American Indians in UCLA’s current student body reflects how well these minorities have earned, or not earned, their part at UCLA.

Guzmán is an anthropology graduate student.