<p>@redhotrock: You’d hope the review admissions process would be fair to you, however, I have a sneaking suspicion that your chances are hampered by UT’s desire to accept as many OOS applicants as they can so they can get the increased tuition. THat doesn’t leave much room in the class for highly prepared students from excellent schools that are outside the top 8%.</p>
<p>H1roshi, toward the end of the report are tables showing the GPAs earned by top 10% and non-top 10%. They demonstrate students chosen purely by rank have consistenly earned mostly higher GPAs. There is a companion report that reviews retention and graduation rates that similarly shows top 10%ers do better in both.</p>
<p>Don’t misunderstand. I am not a proponent of the current law placing such heavy reliance on rank for admission. I like variations on the proposal, e.g., Power’s idea to drop it down to 50% rank/50% holistic review. However, people should review facts before they try to argue that the rank system has caused a preponderance of inferior students to be admitted.</p>
<p>If you refer to table 6a of the study cited above you will see the average freshman year GPA for white students. </p>
<p>The average freshman year GPA for Non-10%'ers who scored 1500+/1600 on the SAT is 3.29.</p>
<p>The average freshman year GPA for top 10%'ers who scored 1200-1299/1600 on the SAT is 3.29. </p>
<p>I would love to see the law scaled back, but the evidence is rather overwhelming that the class rank is doing a good job of predicting freshman year success. Better than SAT scores.</p>
<p>@hkem123: I see something much more disturbing in this table. </p>
<p>UT should be linking these tables to their admissions page. They could call it “reality check”. One could just look up college/school and race and compare their SAT score … done! </p>
<p>Things would go much more smoothly. Less apps to process. Less wasted time for all.</p>
<p>@eaglemom</p>
<p>That is (slightly) the case in the UC System, and even they still have a huge preference for in-staters. UT and Texas as a whole is not nearly as bad off as the UC System and California economically (we actually did comparatively well in relation to all other states during the recession, especially bankrupt california), and on top of that, being a subsidized state university, in-staters (even those outside the top-8%) still take priority over OOSers. They may take a bit more OOSers than usual this year but it will not be an unusually large amount</p>
<p>" Per SB 175, at least 90% of all first-time freshmen must be Texas residents; the law requires that UT both offer and grant admissions to the Top 1%, 2%, 3%, etc. until three-quarter of those slots are filled. Thus, only 67.5% - 90% * .75 – of any first-time freshmen class will be composed of Texas residents admitted under the Top (integer) Policy – SB 175. SB 175 allows UT-Austin fill the remaining 10% of any first-time freshmen class with either out-of-state or international students."</p>
<p>credit to StanTr</p>
<p>Well I feel rather dumb; I don’t know how I missed that part…
In any case I’m not saying that top 8%'s are only in there because of a disparity in schooling difficulty, but that the current system doesn’t take into account the massive differences in high schools. </p>
<p>And while I’m looking at the tables, there are some wildly varying GPA’s for top 8 and non top 8. Business and Engineering GPA’s seem to be roughly equal, whilst certain majors the non auto admits do far worse in. I’m also not sure how accurate a representation this is when some schools have less than 20 people not automatically admitted, shrinking down the sampling pool. The table is rather meaningless until they release measures such as ranges and medians, or at least a measurement which allows us to determine if the scores are skewed by outliers</p>
<p>@hkem123
I do see that, but I also notice that every other race manages to keep the gap below .03, which seems rather impressive given that these are the kids who are going against the best of the best(according to rank).</p>