A report issued on Thursday by a University of California review panel leaves open the question of whether the university system is favoring black and Hispanic applicants, in violation of state law.

The debate over whether the university continues to grant racial preferences "is far from settled," said John J. Moores, chairman of the system's Board of Regents, whose allegations of racial bias in admissions helped prompt Robert C. Dynes, the system's president, to establish the panel in November (The Chronicle, October 17).

The 17-member panel, called the Eligibility and Admissions Study Group, consisted of regents, administrators, and faculty members. It concluded, based on a review of admissions data, that several system campuses are admitting black and Hispanic students at slightly higher rates, and Asian-American students at somewhat lower rates, than could be predicted on the basis of the students' grades and admissions-test scores.

But the group left open the possibility that its method for predicting admissions rates may be flawed, or that some factor other than race might account for the differences that it found.

The panel recommended that the system's administrators conduct their own review of admissions data to see if there was an explanation for the different admissions rates of different races. President Dynes, who was informed of the panel's findings related to race last month, has already directed admissions officers and data analysts at the university's central office to start such a study.

But Mr. Moores, who was a member of the admissions study group, expressed skepticism that admissions officers would produce any finding implicating themselves for granting racial preferences, in violation of the state's Constitution.

"We are asking the fox to go back and recount the eggs," said Mr. Moores, who has alleged that admissions officers have been using the system's "comprehensive review" admissions policy to skirt Proposition 209, the constitutional ban on the use of racial preferences by state agencies that was adopted by California voters in 1996. The comprehensive-review policy allows admissions officers to consider applicants' nonacademic qualities, such as being the first in a family to attend college.

The study group's report found that black and Hispanic students have much less of an edge than they did before 1998, the first year in which entering classes were shaped by Proposition 209 and by a separate ban on racial preferences in admissions that was adopted by the regents three years before.

At the University of California at San Diego, for example, 77.4 percent of black applicants were admitted in 1997, when race could still be considered; just 39 percent would have been admitted based on grades and test scores, the study group said. By 2003, 30.2 percent of black applicants were admitted to the campus, while 28.5 percent could have been expected to gain admission based on grades and test scores.

The study group also noted that black and Hispanic students are much less likely to be eligible for admission to the University of California than members of other racial and ethnic groups, and that their numbers on the system's campuses remain small. Last year, black and Hispanic students accounted for 42.7 percent of students graduating from the state's high schools but just 18.4 percent of the freshmen entering the University of California.

Much of the study group's work, and resulting report, dealt with issues unrelated to race.

The group found, for example, that the University of California may be accepting less-qualified students than envisioned by the state's Master Plan for Higher Education. The master plan calls for the top 12.5 percent of the state's high-school graduates to be eligible for admission to the University of California, but the study group found that the system's admissions criteria leave a larger share of graduates eligible to attend.