Give all students fair shake

LSU’s relaxed admission standards don’t look so good, according to a survey done by the state Board of Regents. Students enrolled at LSU as “exceptions” had lower grades, were more likely to leave early and didn’t graduate at the same rate as those who met the required standards.

Athletes who were admitted by exception did better academically, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. The universities routinely provided tutoring, study halls and other services to ensure the athletes remained academically eligible.

LSU last year no longer automatically rejected applicants who scored too low on the ACT. The flagship university is supposed to reject most students who don’t score 25 on the ACT and have a high school gradepoint average of at least 3.0. LSU officials said more emphasis would be placed on recommendation letters, personal essays and activities outside academia.

Jason Droddy, LSU vice chancellor, said the university wants to see what a student “did over four years rather than how he or she did over four hours” taking tests.

What LSU is doing is called “holistic admissions,” and it has been reported that more than 1,000 schools in the country have eliminated standardized testing as an admissions requirement.

LSU President F. King Alexander said the university brought in the largest, most diverse freshman class on record. He said the class had an average GPA of 3.5, an average ACT score of nearly 26 and 18 percent of the class scored 30 or more on the ACT.

Richard Lipsey, a longtime member of the Board of Regents, was an early outspoken critic of LSU’s new policy. He said before standards were raised high-performing students left for other state flagship universities and never returned.

The Advocate in an editorial said holistic admissions don’t rely on objective standards like test scores and grades and that “may be getting a thumbs-up in the Ivy League, but at LSU, the flagship of Louisiana’s public higher education system, it doesn’t seem like a wise call.”

The newspaper talked about a similar controversy in 1985 when then-LSU Chancellor Jim Wharton set rigid minimum requirements that selected only higher-performing students. Former Gov. John McKeithen, a member of the LSU Board of Supervisors at the time, said Wharton was violating LSU’s tradition as a poor man’s university, a place where any Louisiana youngster could get a college education.

A number of members of the current Board of Supervisors support Alexander’s admission policy. J. Stephen Perry, a former chairman of the board, said the new policy would ensure that the university has every tool with which to evaluate every student’s potential to excel.

The Advocate in its editorial asked, “Now, what is the board to say if other campuses decide they want to emulate LSU and drop objective standards for freshmen?”

Louisiana Tech, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of New Orleans are classified as statewide universities. Their students must have a grade-point average of 2.5 and score 23 on the ACT. The others are regional universities that require a grade-point average of 2.0 and 20 on the ACT. Two-year institutions have open admissions.

The regents in their latest survey looked at students who were admitted in the fall of 2016 and 2017. They found that 2,315 freshmen failed to meet one of the admissions criteria set by the regents. The grade-point averages for those students was 2.0, which lagged behind the 41,580 students who met the minimum standards and ended the first term with an average of 2.7 percent.

Marty Chabert, chairman of the Board of Regents, said the current study was the first step in an investigation to see if the state’s public universities are following the regents’ admission rules and whether changes to the standards need to be considered.

When admissions standards were set in 2001, the regents allowed universities some flexibility in admitting students who don’t meet the standards. It’s 4 percent for LSU, 6 percent for statewide universities and 8 percent for regional universities like McNeese State University.

The regents found that LSU admitted the most students on exception, with 577 in 2016 and 2017 — more than the 524 enrolled by the three statewide universities.

Chabert said, “It’s critical that we understand the characteristics of students admitted by exception, but more importantly, how they perform. We do a disservice to students if we do not place them in the best environment to succeed. However, sometimes events make it difficult for our incoming freshmen to meet all the requirements…”

Whether holistic admissions are a good idea for Louisiana remains to be seen. Only time and experience will determine whether it should be expanded or abandoned. Meanwhile, if there are going to be exceptions to the current standards shouldn’t all the exception students get the same tutoring and other help athletes are getting?

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Jim Beam, the retired editor of the American Press, has covered people and politics for more than five decades. Contact him at 337-515-8871 or jbeam@americanpress.com.