Top ten percent
...class. The rejection letter stated that his “academic record did not meet the required competitive level,”(Nissimov, 1a) but his accomplishments such as maintaining a 3.94 grade point average and scoring a 1240 on his SAT (180 points above the national average) clearly states otherwise. His only draw back was attending a very academically competitive high school, if considered a draw back. Therefore, is the state telling the students that it is better to receive a bad high school education and be less prepared, but do better based solely on going to a less competitive school and doing better there. His grade point average would have easily placed him in the top ten percent in many other schools but at the high school he attended, it only managed to secure him a spot in the top 30 percent. The top ten percent rule has caused students, parents, and schools to do outrageous things to get students in the top ten percent of their class. In some instances, parents were forced to move out of their home and or illegally place their children into a less competitive and less challenging school by falsifying their address. In Marc Levin’s article, “Dumbing Down of the Education Plaguing Texas and the Nation,” he states that “There have been reports of parents transferring their children to inferior high schools to give them a better chance at graduating in the top ten percent, thereby receiving automatic admission to UT and A&M. This outgrowth of the top ten percent rule provides a clear example of how leveling can bring an entire educational system down to the lowest common denominator”(Levin, 2). These students may achieve the top ten percent status but in essence, they sacrifice the better education that they could have received. There have been cases in some schools that have squeezed extra student in the top ten percent. At Westlake High School, 63 of the 491 seniors were in the top ten percent, but the math clearly shows us that in actuality that would make it 12.8 percent. “Ms. Faske, the school’s college career counselor, concedes that the school did inflate some student’s class rank”(Golden, 1). Another instance was at Lyndon Baines Johnson High School where 15 percent of the seniors managed to graduate with the top ten percent status. The outcome of so many students accepted through the top ten percent automatic admission rule is that there is little room left for regular admission. As a result of this, many students end up in the provisional program offered by UT Austin. The requirement for acceptance through the provisional program is that students are required to take 12 credit hours in the subjects of mathematics, science, social science, and English. They must pass all of their classes with no incompletes and must maintain a minimum grade point average of 2.25. The provisional program is considered a tough and lengthy program but Mr. Hall, a professor of Biology at UT, best describes it by stating the “the provisional program is basically 9 weeks of cramming”(Hall). The students that do make it into UT under the provisional program are faced with another dilemma; they are automatically placed in the school of liberal arts. This poses a problem for many of the students who want to pursue a degree in a major outside of liberal arts, because the requirements to transfer into another major are extremely high. This controversial subject brings along with it much heated debate on whether the top ten percent rule helps bring an increase of minorities into our Texas Universities. National leading newspapers such as USA today have written, “The top ten percent rule has had successful results because it promotes racial diversity, and it still rewards hard work and merit”(Evans, 2). Other Supporters of the top 10% plan call it a merit-based alternative to affirmative action, emphasizing that the law leveled the playing field in access to the public universities, although admissions officers remarked that additional outreach and scholarship programs also are necessary to ensure enrollment of top percentile students from low income schools(Walker and Lavergne, 2001). The actual statistics of the amount of minorities accepted in the top ten percent contradicts this statement. “In 1999, blacks accounted for four percent of the undergraduate population, the same as in 1996. Hispanics accounted for fourteen percent of the undergraduate students today in 1999, also the same as in 1996”(Nissimov, 20a). The value of minorities accepted in those three years is unchanged. Half of Asian top ten percent students enrolled in a college or university classified as highly or most selective, but only 28 and 19 percent of similarly ranked Hispanic and black graduates, respectively, enrolled. Of course, these enrollment distributions are restricted to the division of high achieving graduates who...