[caption id=”attachment_140664″ align=”aligncenter” width=”1201″] Image via WJON
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Graduate students at the University of Minnesota are leading a charge to make the school’s admissions faculty go through special bias training in an effort to increase diversity on campus, according to reports from the student newspaper and Campus Reform.
The university’s Council of Graduate Students suggested the bias training as part of their platform for the upcoming school year, the group’s president Nicholas Goldsmith told the Minnesota Daily.
Admissions staff at UM’s medical school already go through a training on “implicit bias,” the article noted. The medical school also looks beyond test scores when making admissions decisions, according to Jon Gottesman, director of the Office of Biomedical Graduate Research, Education and Training.
“A timed test [like the GRE] for someone who speaks a foreign language just doesn’t work,” Gottesman said.
Instead, admissions officers place more emphasis on research experience and recommendation letters.
Gottesman said that while applicants’ test scores may look lower than in past years, the quality, number and diversity of applicants has increased.
The Minnesota Daily also cited a Campus Climate Report, released earlier this year, as evidence that students at the University of Minnesota are calling for more diversity. The report studied data from student surveys over the past four years and found that “students of color feel the campus is less welcoming than white students,” and “the campus would feel more welcoming for students of color if they saw more people like themselves on our campus.”
The report concluded that increasing diversity and expanding the number of underrepresented faculty, staff and students at the university should be top priorities moving forward.
