I think the 10% is OK (not w/o flaws) for undergrad, it makes almost no sense at the graduate level. The primary reason it has fatal flaws is well articulated below: "I don't know if it would have near the result that it has given the undergrad schools," said Matt Turner, assistant director in the MBA program at the Red McCombs School of Business. "At the undergrad levels, they are looking at tons of high schools across Texas of all different caliber and geographic distribution - that is a sort of a horse of a different color than looking at colleges." However if you read the proposal it has an important twists different from the 10% rule as applied to undergrad.... Wilson has proposed that a certain percentage of the class be slotted for the top 10 percent recipients. If the number of applicants exceeds the slots available then the institute should conduct a lottery. If a student is not chosen, then he or she could postpone admission until a slot becomes available. ..in other words it doesn't radically change the admissions approach for most applicants or most eventual students. Personally I think it is a bad approach--a modified Michigan approach makes more sense than this one. Also, test scores, GPAs, they both are important pieces of predicting success though neither is all that great. They are both much better than letters of rec--who any slacking dimwitted, but good brownoser, can get high marks on.
I'd rather have a realistic ratio like top 5%, place it with half emphasis while the standardized test score emphasizing the other half. If you pass a grad school, you're 'qualified' are you not? The pressure should be on the students to conform to the curriculum at that level, not the opposite. If you feel the quality is decreased, then there's always the good elite private alternative.
In many graduate programs I've seen, one of the requirements has always been needing the correct undergraduate prereqs. For example, one cannot start graduate study at UT-Austin in advertising without having some previous advertising classes. Yes, those courses could be made up before starting the program as levelling courses, but I know some schools require the courses to be finished at a certain level before the graduate application will be approved. It would seem to me this plan would change at least the last part of this, requiring admission to Top Ten Percenters before they've done the levelling work. Though I imagine the levelling work could still be required and a student could be removed if they don't maintain a certain GPA in the levelling classes. I don't think this is going to end up passing, though, so it's not really anything to spend too much time thinking about the nuances of.
Definitely. The TAAS and standardized testing, in general, are destroying education in America. Instead of learning about history and science and math, students are learning how to take a test. Instead of having a diversified, well-rounded education that includes both skill-based (science, math, writing) and esoteric (philosophy, economics, arts) classes, students are spending 1/3 of their time learning how to be glorified Jeopardy contestants except they don't have to answer in the form of a question. The top 10% for grad schools is a mistake. It would be a logistical nightmare and it would not place the best kids in programs that would lead them to real skill in their field of study.
