UC Admissions After the SAT/ACT Ban
UC Admissions After the SAT/ACT Ban is a data visualization dashboard exploring how the removal of SAT/ACT requirements affected UC admission rates across different ethnic groups.
Driving question: How did the removal of SAT/ACT requirements affect UC admission rates across different ethnic groups?
Methodology: The dashboard uses UC's own published systemwide/campus admissions data by ethnicity (2017–2025, freshman and transfer, applicants/admits/enrollees), rather than the school-level modeling tables, because UC redacts any school-level ethnicity cell below 5 applicants or 3 admits — summing those redacted rows would undercount smaller groups by a large amount. To avoid conflating "test-optional because of COVID" with "test-blind by policy," the timeline is split into three eras: Pre-COVID (≤2019, SAT/ACT required and considered), COVID transition (2020–2021, testing suspended or access disrupted), and Post-removal (2022–2025, fully test-blind). Admit rate is computed by pooling counts first and then dividing, rather than averaging per-year rates, to avoid small-year noise skewing the results. The "net shift" view compares the pooled Pre-COVID rate to the pooled Post-removal rate for each ethnicity, in percentage points.
Scope and limits: The dashboard shows systemwide (or a selected campus's) admit rate trends; it is descriptive, not causal. Applicant volumes by ethnicity also changed over this period independent of the testing policy, which affects rates on its own — the per-era applicant/admit tables let a user check whether a rate change came from more admits, fewer or more applicants, or both. Race is recorded here only as a reported outcome: California's Prop 209 (1996) prohibits UC from using race as an admissions input, so these are not race-conscious admissions decisions, only their demographic result. "Unknown" and "International" are excluded from the default view since they don't represent a U.S. racial/ethnic category comparison, but can be re-added via the ethnicity filter.
What the dashboard does:
Trend line — admit rate by ethnicity, 2017–2025, with the COVID/removal transition window shaded.
Three-era tabs — applicant/admit volume and admit rate per ethnicity, matching Pre-COVID / COVID transition / Post-removal, with a data table.
Net shift chart — percentage-point change in admit rate per ethnicity, Pre-COVID baseline vs. Post-removal.
Auto-generated conclusion — recomputed live from whatever campus/level/ethnicity filters the user has selected, naming the largest gain and the largest drop.
All charts are filterable by applicant type (freshman/transfer), campus, and ethnicity group.
Built With: HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, Chart.js
Try it out: UC Admissions Dashboard
See more at: UC Admissions Dashboard GitHub
Final Presentation
If the PDF doesn't display above, open it in a new tab.