USP cancels registration of quota student approved in medicine

Approved by the quota system, student Alison dos Santos Rodrigues, 18 years old, had his enrollment canceled in the medicine course at the University of São Paulo (USP) after the judging panel don’t consider him brown. The shareholder was informed of the decision on the first day of class, last Monday (26).

“I had the displeasure of hearing the news that I was not approved, even though I formally identified as mixed race. And everything that happened left me floored, it feels like the world ended because it was something very difficult to achieve”, the young man told the portal G1.

Rodrigues was approved in the first call by Provão Paulista, a state government program. He applied for a vacancy reserved for public school students and self-declared black, brown and indigenous people.

The student activated the public defense to recover a place on the undergraduate course through legal action. The young man is from the municipality of Cerqueira Cesar, in the interior of the state of São Paulo, where the student’s approval was celebrated by teachers at the Rodrigues school with the installation of a billboard at the entrance to the city. The medicine course is the most popular at USPconsidered one of the main universities in the country.

In a note, USP reaffirmed its decision and highlighted that the evaluation panel’s process is technical. “No panel knows whether the photo is being analyzed for the first or second time, which guarantees a double blind analysis of the photographs. At the end of the process, if two panels do not approve the photo by a simple majority, the candidate is automatically called to a hearing face-to-face”, explains the university.

“Regarding the specific case of student Alison dos Santos Rodrigues, the final deliberation took place last Friday, February 23rd, and was sent the following day. It is important to emphasize that all candidates who had resources being analyzed knew that enrollment was conditioned to the result of the hetero-identification examinations. What the student had was a pre-registration conditioned to the result of the hetero-identification process”, explains USP.