Building a Class at UC Oceanview (A) & (B)

Christine Dao, vice provost for enrollment management at UC Oceanview — a fictional, selective University of California system campus — must remove 2,800 students from an 8,000-person admit list after an 18% state funding cut, with offer letters scheduled to mail April 1 and every other cost lever already exhausted. Five senior administrators each advocate a different identity-neutral removal criterion: an absolute AP/IB course count, a contextual rigor ratio, an unweighted-GPA floor on completed A–G coursework, geographic diversity caps, and a holistic review composite. Race-conscious adjustments are prohibited under California’s Proposition 209 and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

Case (A) closes before Dao decides, positioning students to argue a criterion on its merits. Case (B) distributes the adverse-impact analysis the morning after: every criterion produces measurable disparity on at least one admit group, and different criteria harm different groups through different structural mechanisms. Two of the five measure the same construct — academic rigor — and differ only in the denominator. An interactive simulator lets students commit to a position before seeing what it costs, and to whom.

• Calculate adverse impact by comparing the demographic composition of a removed pool to the full admit pool, and interpret the direction and magnitude of observed disparities and whether they clear the four-fifths screen.
• Distinguish among the structural mechanisms that produce disparate impact—school resource inequality (AP access), residential segregation (geographic concentration), implicit bias in subjective evaluation (holistic review), and measurement-design choices (absolute vs. contextual operationalization)—and identify which mechanism is operative for each criterion.
• Evaluate the competing obligations of a public university—academic readiness, geographic representation, institutional culture, legal compliance, and equitable access—and articulate how the choice of removal criterion reflects a normative prioritization among them.
• Compare the absolute and contextual operationalizations of academic rigor and explain how measurement design—specifically, the choice of denominator—determines who bears the cost of a seemingly neutral criterion.
• Assess the limits of identity-neutral decision-making in a structurally unequal context, and explain why Proposition 209’s prohibition on race-conscious admissions does not prevent race-correlated outcomes.