The way Arizona high school seniors are admitted to state universities will change, the Arizona Board of Regents decided Friday.
In its last meeting of the spring semester, the regents voted on several changes to its policies regarding admission guarantees for seniors.
One proposal discussed would insert the word "fair" into a policy on the admission of home-schooled students. Currently, only high school students in the top 25 percent of their graduating class are guaranteed admission to Arizona universities.
Because there is no ranking for home-schooled students, they have no similar admission guarantee.
"This is an issue of fairness, and we need to give these wonderful students the reassurance they need," said regent Gary Stuart.
In Arizona, about one-tenth of 1 percent of all applications to ASU, NAU and UA are home-schooled students, and according to UA President Peter Likins, almost all are admitted and graduate at a rate of almost 100 percent.
"We need to create a confidence among the home-schooled community, but at the same time, if we were for instance to designate a 1200 SAT score as the guarantee mark, it would be unfair to the thousands of high school students who achieve that score, but are not good candidates for the university because of grades and behavior reasons," Likins said.
The regents voted to continue discussing the guaranteed admission issue and decide the policy change at their June 24 meeting in Flagstaff.
The board also voted to change the Regents High Honors Endorsement Program. The program was created in 1998 to reward high-performing high school students.
The regents voted that students receiving high honors would get a tuition waiver from the Arizona university of their choice.
"If we give our best students the incentive to do well in school and do well on the AIMS test, then that will reflect on how the entire school scores in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act," said Tom Horne, superintendent of Public Instruction at the Arizona Department of Education.
"Education should be a seamless transition from preschool to doctorate," Horne said. "In order to produce more qualified teachers, we need to motivate students to do well."
The regents held a first reading about a board policy that would create a uniform procedure for conducting background checks on university employees, the hiring of convicted felons and the retention or termination of employees who have been convicted of a felony offense.
The regents also approved a $268,000 virus-prevention system that will be used at all three universities to help prevent virus-infected computers from gaining access to university networks.
Reach the reporter at annemarie.moody@asu.edu.
