- "The universities did little yesterday to conceal
the fact that admissions policies are being altered to benefit Jewish candidates."
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- There's no politically correct spin to put on it, and
the facts speak for themselves: As soon as Israel's top university administrators
noticed that the big winners from admissions policy changes were not Jewish
youngsters from low-income towns, but rather Arabs, they reverted back
to the old admissions system.
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- This year, the universities instituted a policy change
- the abandonment of psychometric aptitude tests as a requirement for admissions.
However, once university officials realized that the main beneficiaries
were Arabs, they decided to reinstate the exams.
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- During the upcoming academic year, university admission
candidates will be judged according to the old system, which is based on
a combination of high school matriculation exam results and the psychometric
tests. By reinstating the old system, the universities apparently intend
to guard against high enrollments of Arab students in selected departments.
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- One of the country's universities studied the results
of this year's new admissions policies - candidates had to submit their
results from various high school matriculation exams rather than take the
aptitude tests. However, the university discovered that the new admissions
system benefits Arab candidates. For example, the percentage of Arab students
who were supposed to be accepted to the university's faculty of dental
medicine under the new system was 52 percent; in the previous academic
year, when psychometric results were part of the admissions policy, Arab
students comprised just 29 percent of the first-year class. The same held
true for the university's occupational therapy department: under the new
admissions system, 56 percent of first-year students were to be Arabs;
under last year's old admissions system, the figure was 19 percent.
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- To prevent a heavy influx of Arab students in fields
such as dental medicine and occupational therapy, the university instituted
what one department head described as "revisions" in its admissions
policy. "We set the [minimum] entry age for studies at 20, instead
of 18, and we also gave added weight to personal interviews with candidates,"
the department head said in describing the "revisions." The Arab
candidates do not serve in the Israel Defense Forces, so the previous minimum
entry age, 18, worked to their advantage, while increasing the importance
of personal interviews worked to the disadvantage of Arab candidates, partly
because the interviews are not conducted in their native language. As a
result, the "revisions" helped the university departments maintain
the same Jewish-Arab demographics that had been obtained in previous years.
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- The universities did little yesterday to conceal the
fact that admissions policies are being altered to benefit Jewish candidates.
"Admissions policies based on [high school] grades do not make studies
more accessible to [Jewish] students from the periphery. The opposite is
true," declared the committee of university heads. In its statement,
the committee was careful not to use the words "Jews" and "Arabs,"
but its intention was clear. In a euphemistic idiom, it wrote: "since
the number of places available in university enrollment has not risen,
the acceptance of one population [that is, the Arab students, R.S.] nudges
out another population [Jews, R.S.]"
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- Based on cold statistics, it remains unclear how this
year's new admissions policy, which took into account matriculation exam
results, unwittingly instituted an affirmative action program for Arab
youth. For years, the Arab secondary school system has notched poor matriculation
exam results due to chronic discrimination in budget fund allocations.
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- Two weeks ago, the heads of the universities worked out
an arrangement with Education Minister Limor Livnat and Knesset Education
and Culture Committee Chairman MK Ilan Shalgi (Shinui) whereby the system
of considering matriculation exam results in lieu of psychometric exams
is to be "suspended for one year" rather than be scrapped permanently.
At the end of the current academic year, the universities are to submit
to the Knesset committee empirical research studies that address the correlation
between academic performance in higher education and psychometric exam
or matriculation test success. Since the universities vehemently opposed
adoption of the system used this year and claimed that psychometric exam
results are the most reliable indicator of success in higher education
settings, it can be expected that the research will point to the need for
reinstating the psychometric tests as an important factor in admissions
decisions.
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