The Texas A&M system’s board of regents academic affairs committee agrees to continue discussing possible changes in freshmen admission standards.
The regents were told 70 percent of this year’s freshman applicants at the flagship submitted test scores. System administrators were directed to find out how many were admitted without test scores.
This year’s freshman class at the flagship is the first where students did not have to submit their SAT or ACT scores. A&M interim president and professor of aerospace engineering John Junkins supports from personal experience keeping an optional testing requirement.
The system’s vice chancellor of academics, James Hallmark, and A&M’s vice president for enrollment and academic services Joe Pettibon also brought up what else is considered in the admissions process.
A second issue that was discussed was raised by regent and Aggie graduate Michael Hernandez of Ft. Worth, was the value of an high school senior’s “Aggie legacy”. Hernandez said “My whole life, I wanted to be an Aggie. There’s a lot of students out there like that. They don’t care. They want to be Aggies.”
The chairman of the academic affairs committee and another Aggie graduate, Cliff Thomas of Victoria, said for ten years “this has been talked about a lot”, adding “It’s never the answer that I want, because the hardest thing for a regent is (they) can’t help a good Ag alumni that bleeds maroon and donates money to every organization they can here. And I personally think that’s not good business to ignore that, but we’ve been told through the years we can’t consider that legacy.”
Pettibon said “we don’t specifically call out legacy in giving additional points. Similarly, we don’t call out race in terms of an added factor in the admission decision.”
Pettibon and Hallmark brought up some applications reflect legacy. Hallmark said “I think that is impacted as the reviewers looks at these, versus somebody who just answers real perfunctorily just a sentence or two on this as opposed to somebody who has really spent a lot of time thinking through (and) how can I package myself so that they know how much I want to be here?”
Click below for comments from the May 19, 2021 Texas A&M system board of regents academic affairs committee meeting. Speakers are Joe Pettibon, John Junkins, James Hallmark, and regents Jay Graham, Michael Hernandez, Michael Plank, and Cliff Thomas.