History

 Balancing Excellence with Equity: An Annotated History of the Alternative Admissions Research Project

In 1986, the Academic Planning Committee of the University of Cape Town became involved in the initiation of the Alternative Admissions Research Project (AARP). The primary objective of the AARP was to devise selection criteria to identify talented, but educationally disadvantaged students, who could be said to have the potential to succeed at UCT in a context of appropriate academic support and curriculum structuring that would address the learning needs of the students thus identified. For students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds particularly, results on school-leaving examinations had historically borne an extremely unreliable relationship with academic performance in Higher Education, and the specific mandate of the AARP was to establish alternative selection criteria by which to address the question of assessing academic potential in these students. This mandate was directly aligned with UCT policy that was focused on redress in the context of a then racially fragmented South African Higher Education system.

In 1987, a pilot study was carried out in order to assess the criteria being developed for selection as well as the feasibility of pre-matriculation selection itself. 147 Western Cape candidates from formerly Department of Education and Training (DET) Schools were tested and, of these, twenty students who had been selected on the basis of the AARP criteria registered at UCT in 1988. At this stage, a Language Test was the only instrument used. The development of this test was co-ordinated by Nan Yeld, the then-Deputy Director of UCT’s Academic Development Programme. The development team included Language and Curriculum experts drawn from staff of the Academic Development Programme as well as more widely at UCT.

Key features of the Language Testing initiative were: (1) For reasons of efficiency and scale of reach, the Test would be a pencil-and-paper instrument; (2) It would aim to assess a writer’s ability to cope with the typical reading and writing demands required of them in a Higher Education context in the particular medium-of-instruction of that context; (3) The Test would be non-curriculum aligned so as not to further disadvantage students whose schooling may have inadequately equipped them to cope with the demands of tertiary study; (4) The Test would be focused on assessing capacity for thinking, verbal reasoning, and visual literacy and numeracy in the medium-of-instruction rather than on language per se; (5) As far as possible, language-as-vehicle rather than language-as-target would be assessed; (6) Tasks in the Test would be scaffolded as far as possible to ensure that writers could benefit from the teaching inherent in the Test before they had to attempt the tasks.

In the early years, the focus of the testing initiative was solely on assessing students for alternative access. Diagnostic information collected by means of the Test was minimally used. Data collection and processing was easy to manage, given the small numbers and seasonal focus of the project work.

While the initial staffing complement proved adequate to deal with the setting up of the testing aspect of the Project, it was not able to achieve significantly more than this. Also, the eighties was a period of great political turbulence in South Africa, and this had a significant impact on the amount of time it took to organise and secure community acceptance of the Project. Meetings with the joint SRCs of township schools, for example, took place under conditions of extreme secrecy and uncertainty. Establishment of the national testing initiative under such conditions therefore represented a considerable achievement.

By the nineteen-nineties, there was a shift of focus for AARP. A constant increase in the number of writers and national writing centres created the need for a Project Administrator. Furthermore, an increase in the amount of data yielded lead to the development of a central data server and the post of Database Administrator.

In 1992, the Project formally became part of the organisational structure of the ADP, although it retained its autonomy in terms of funding and policy direction. This arrangement proved satisfactory and was assisted by the historically close ties between the two enterprises: from 1991 to 2002, for example, the Deputy-Director of the ADP was the Co-ordinator of the Project, and before this was seconded by the ADP to the Project on a part-time basis to develop the language side of the testing initiative.

Another significant aspect of the mid-nineties was the design and development of the Mathematics Comprehension Test (MCOM) as well as the Mathematics Achievement Test (MACH). The principal goal in the design of the MCOM was the assessment of writers’ potential for Mathematical thinking at the level required of a student wanting to major in Mathematics. The MACH, on the other hand, was designed to assess the “gaps” in Mathematical knowledge of students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. The Language Test was also redeveloped as the current Placement Test in English for Educational Purposes (PTEEP). At this time, AARP began testing nationally for UCT admissions and it acquired its first external “client” in Rhodes University.

Following the demise of segregated schooling, eligibility to participate in the Project was widened to include all applicants. However, since the actual conditions under which schools were operating had not changed (i.e. ex-DET schools remained disadvantaged), it remained necessary to consider student performance in terms of the historical education system within which the student had been schooled. At UCT, AARP recommendations were officially included in the early offer system and the AARP resulting procedure was formally integrated into the Central Database of applicant information.

Towards the latter end of the nineties, the Project was approached by a number of external institutions interested in using the tests and procedures. By 1998, the following South African Higher Education institutions had used the Tests for various purposes: Rhodes, Pretoria, Stellenbosch, Fort Hare, Natal and Pretoria Universities. The tests had also been used in industry for bursary selection and various other reasons. This heralded a new chapter in AARP where the Project moved towards income-generation for its services. More importantly, AARP began to make a major contribution to the development nationally of expertise in the area of access and particularly that of student selection.

Another area of AARP expertise arose in the late nineties in that information yielded by the AARP tests was used more frequently in a diagnostic manner. Cluster analyses were carried out and in-depth throughput and diagnostic reports were generated for UCT Faculties and external clients. The end of the nineties also heralded an ambitious phase of statistical reporting on AARP throughput data - culminating in the highly successful validation of the Project in a survival analysis report produced by staff of the UCT Statistics Department and later independently replicated by an externally conducted research consultant.

The AARP operation moved from strength to strength in the new millennium and a full-time Mathematics Test Developer, a full-time Language Test Developer and a full-time Statistician were formally incorporated into the Project. A support staff consisting of a full-time Senior Secretary, a full-time Research and Administrative Officer and a full-time Project Manager made up the rest of the AARP team. In 2002, the post of Acting Co-ordinator of AARP was created in order to relieve the Deputy Director of the ADP of the growing burden of managing AARP as part of her ADP workload. The post of Co-ordinator of AARP was confirmed during 2003. All these posts allowed for a concentrated separation of the Research, Test Development and Research Administration functions. An illustration of the phenomenal growth in the use of AARP tests can be seen in the number of candidates tested between the inception of the project and the current day. In 2004, the AARP tested approximately 24500 writers nationally – a far cry from the 147 tested for UCT in 1988!

The future for AARP includes an expansion of work opportunities to include testing for all  UCT Faculties, continuing testing for the Health Sciences Consortium as well as testing for numerous universities and universities of technology. The Health Sciences Consortium is currently composed of the Universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Witwatersrand, Transkei, Free State and Kwazulu-Natal. The consistent provision of quality service and research, an increased demand for testing, as well as external environmental factors such as the impact of FETC, place AARP in a stimulating and challenging position for the future.