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BERKELEY — University of California officials played down a report that they have developed preliminary proposals for major changes in admissions, including eliminating the SAT requirement. 

A story published in Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle said a draft report, which came out of a recent one-day conference on admissions, recommends eliminating the SAT and giving extra weight to consideration of students who participate in UC’s outreach programs. 

UC has struggled with decreasing black and Hispanic admissions since dropping affirmative action two years ago. Although UC no long can consider race, it can recruit and support disadvantaged students and the conference, attended by about a hundred UC admissions directors, faculty, students and system officials, was part of that effort. 

The Chronicle noted the draft recommendations are subject to months of review and some may have to be approved by regents. 

“It is going to make it possible for students in disadvantaged situations to prepare themselves better to apply to the UC,” Alex Saragoza, vice president for educational outreach, told the newspaper. 

Saragoza did not return a telephone call Friday to The Associated Press. 

But UC Provost C. Judson King responded to the article with a statement saying the conference “produced a variety of ideas but stopped well short of evaluation of those ideas or development of any formal plan for addressing these issues.” 

“We are at the brainstorming stage,” said UC spokesman Brad Hayward. 

UC provided a copy of draft recommendations typed up after the conference, but said they amounted to notes that would go into the creation of a draft report in the future. The draft recommendations released Friday discuss a range of options for the SAT, including reform, elimination or making it optional. 

They also pushed for substantial change in how students become eligible for UC, saying the pool must be broadened “to be accessible to the diverse groups among us.” 

UC has discussed dropping the SAT, the standardized test taken by many high school seniors, before, although the idea hasn’t been put to regents for a vote. The test has been criticized as a poor predictor of how students will do in college and culturally biased against minorities. 

However, some regents support it as a yardstick against grade inflation. 

If UC did eliminate the SAT, it would be a major move, said Bob Schaeffer of Fair Test, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which fights bias in standardized tests. 

“For the biggest public education system in the country to take such a move would have tremendous influence,” he said. 

UC Regent Ward Connerly, who led the fight to drop UC’s affirmative action admissions, said he hasn’t seen the proposals. However, he said he was concerned UC is responding to pressure to try to increase the numbers of black and Hispanic students. 

“The Supreme Court has said in the most resounding of terms that we should not be using race, that we cannot try to engineer the outcome and yet we just don’t seem to get the message,” he said. “It’s not broken, the admissions system, so why are we trying to fix it?”