The University of Sao Paulo (USP ) approved on Thursday (23) the creation of a commission to verify if candidates who declared themselves to be black or brown correspond to the racial profile informed by themselves in the application.
The candidates’ hetero-identification panel was a demand of black students, but it faced internal resistance at USP.
The measure, approved by the Graduation Council, aims to curb fraud in quotas and will be applied in the next entrance exam. The rule applies to the 8,230 vacancies offered by fuvest . The committee must verify candidates before confirming enrollment.
Since 2018, USP has adopted quotas for students from public schools and black, brown and indigenous people in all undergraduate courses. Despite the quota policy, there was no prior verification of candidates’ self-declaration.
This situation led the students themselves, organized into collectives, to report the fraud to USP. From 2017 to the middle of last year, the university had already received 200 complaints of fraud in quotas – seven of which resulted in the decision to expel students.
The criteria used by the USP verification commission are yet to be defined, as well as the composition of the panel. The university should collect suggestions by the end of July. The idea is that identification occurs by the candidate’s phenotype, that is, by physical characteristics, such as skin color.
“Our proposal is that, first, an evaluation is carried out based on the photograph of the students’ registration and, regarding those in which there is any kind of doubt or question, we would have a face-to-face conversation”, explained the dean of Inclusion and Belonging, Ana Lúcia Duarte Lanna. She hopes that the very existence of the verification commission will deter fraud attempts.
Student groups pressured the university for the creation of the hetero-identification board to prevent students who would not have the right to quotas from occupying the vacancies of pretos and pardos.
“Discussing the fight against fraud with the alleged registered fraudsters is much more complicated. A discussion of this nature almost always ended up in the Judiciary”, explains Lucas Módolo, a lawyer and one of the founders of the Anti-Fraud Committee, responsible for forwarding most of the complaints to USP.
For former dean Vahan Agopyan, however, the verification of all students who declared themselves PPI was seen as a “police-like” action. “It is not because there are (frauds) that we are going to punish everyone by making the demand,” he told the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo in 2020.
This year, after the election of the new rector, Carlos Gilberto Carlotti Junior , the University Council approved the creation of the Dean of Inclusion and Belonging. Carlotti Junior had already indicated the possibility of creating a hetero-identification board.
Experiences adopted in other universities must be studied to design the USP model. The heteroidentification bank already exists in federal and state universities in São Paulo. The University of Brasília (UnB), the first federal university to use quotas, was a pioneer in the measurement method.
According to Ana Lúcia, the model of prior verification through photography is already adopted by other institutions, such as the State University of Campinas (Unicamp ).
other measures
The university also approved two more novelties in the entrance exam the day before yesterday. Now all candidates regardless of the category in which they applied (broad competition, public school or PPI) will be classified according to their grade in the entrance exam.
The vacancies for broad competition will be filled first, then the public school vacancies, and only then the vacancies for PPI. With this, it is expected to guarantee that more black and public school students will occupy the vacancies at the university.
The Graduation Council also determined the obligation to present proof of complete vaccination and booster doses for freshmen. “Inserting the proof of vaccination into the registration system will be a condition for having the registration accepted”, explains the deputy dean of Graduation, Marcos Neira.
Source: CNN Brasil
