A new software program is on the market to try to help universities increase the diversity of their admitted classes while avoiding discrimination litigation.
The program, Applications Quest, sorts students whom admissions officers have already deemed as qualified for admission into clusters of similar applicants based on a number of factors, such as hometown, major, GPA, race and legacy status.
The software will then recommend that a university admit the member of each cluster who has the most unique characteristics.
Because admissions officers review applications "holistically," they run the risk of being biased towards different groups, said Juan Gilbert, the developer of the software and a computer science professor at Auburn University in Alabama.
This leaves universities open to being sued by rejected applicants who claim they were not admitted on the basis of race.
According to Gilbert, use of the Applications Quest programs avoids these issues because the admissions decisions are "reproducible and measurable."
"You can look at how the results were determined," Gilbert said. "You can actually prove that race is not the deciding factor. It's just one criteria."
Auburn recently announced that it will use the software in admitting its undergraduate class of 2013, making it the first school to publicly say it is using the software.
Gilbert said more than a half-dozen other schools have used the software, but have not gone public with their usage yet. He did not name them, citing a confidentiality agreement.
However, Penn's admissions office has no plans to use it, according to interim Dean of Admissions Eric Kaplan. He said a computer program is incapable of distinguishing which applicants would be the best match for the University.
"The selectivity of the process requires that very fine distinctions are made among extraordinary applicants." Kaplan wrote in an e-mail. "It seems unlikely that these distinctions can be made with a software program."
College junior Lisa Zhu, chairwoman of the United Minorities Council and a columnist for The Daily Pennsylvanian, agreed that the software would not be the best way to diversify admitted classes.
Admissions Quest "only talks about diversity on a macro level," she said. "The experiences of each minority is different."
Pro- and anti-affirmative action groups differ on whether the software could be beneficial.
The American Association for Affirmative Action, a pro-affirmative action group, has yet to look at and test the software, but thinks it could be a helpful tool in preventing lawsuits, said spokeswoman Marjorie Powell.
In contrast, the Center for Equal Opportunity, an anti-affirmative action organization, believes that there are still legal issues with the software because it explicitly uses race as one of its factors, said the center's president, Roger Clegg.
