Thread by @aaronsibarium

NEW: Today the dean of UCLA medical school denied allegations that the school lowers academic standards for minorities, asserting that admissions decisions are "based on merit."

Notice: His statement refers to "false allegations" without saying which ones are false.🧵

The dean also claimed that "medical student final exam scores are well above the national average." It's not clear whether he was referring to the shelf exams—standardized tests that up to 50 percent of some UCLA cohorts now fail, per the school's own data—or to some other test.

The defiant message comes in the wake of whistleblower allegations from eight UCLA professors—four of whom have served on the medical school’s admissions committee—that the school holds black and Latino applicants to lower standards than their white and Asian counterparts.

That practice, admissions officers said, is at least partly to blame for UCLA’s high failure rates on the shelf exams, which are taken after each clinical rotation and test basic medical knowledge. Nationally, only 5 percent of students fail those exams. freebeacon.com/campus/a-faile…

The whistleblowers described a pattern of discriminatory behavior from the med school’s dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, who has allegedly attacked admissions officers for raising concerns about minorities’ test scores and brought up race explicitly in admissions meetings.

She has also argued for moving residency applicants up and down her department’s rank list based on race, according to sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The dean's statement did not mention Lucero by name.

Read the whole thing here: freebeacon.com/campus/ucla-me…