A representative of the State Board of Regents defended the new admission standards for the three public universities in testimony before the Senate Education Committee Monday. Regents policy and operations officer, Diana Gonzalez, says the Regents decided to raise the standard after determining that graduating in the top half of your high school class was not longer enough to predict success in college.

Gonzalez says they determined that "significant contributors to accuracy of predicting success in college were" high school rank, high school grade point average, A-C-T composite score and number of core courses taken in high school. Gonzalez says starting in 2009, those four factors will be used in a formula to determine automatic admission to the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa.

Senator Herman Quirmbach, a democrat from Ames, argued that counting a student’s GPA may lead to grad inflation. But Gonzalez says it’s still a good way to predict someone’s success in college. Gonzalez says if a student falls short of the requirements, they can still be admitted after an individual review. Gonzalez says there are a lot of things that come up that you can’t quantify, such as a student getting ill. Gonzalez says if the new admissions standards had been applied to the freshmen class at the universities — roughly 10-percent of the incoming students would have been rejected.