A Conjecture on Ohio State Admission Policy - Confirm or Disprove

Looking at various data points, it seems that Ohio State is working as follows:

For an In-State Candidate who is not minority, recruited athlete, first generation college student, or Pell grant awardee:

If in Top 10% of HS class,
admit if ACT 28 or above
Admit to engineering if ACT 30 or above, else admit to explorations

If Not in Top 10% but Top 25%,
admit if ACT 31 or above

If Not in Top 25%
Deferred or Rejected Irrespective of ACT score

For Out-of-State,
Similar with some latitude if one of the two criteria not met.

If your experience is different from what the above rules will imply, please post. This should help all candidates present and future.

Do you think it’s easier for an out of state student to get in?

I more or less agree based on our experience …S is OOS, 35C, applied fir CS in COE, 3.6/4.0, but only top 37% due to soph year, and was only admitted to exploration, not COE–in first wave of acceptances. They said his gpa and rank were “among” the reasons.

@osuprof

Permanent Res. - Taiwan

Admitted on 1/8, suppose COE computer science
10-11th rank: 40%
9-11th average: 83.2(A=80-100, B=70-79, C=60-69, D=40-59, F=39under)
School doesn’t offer honor/ap/…
SAT: 1910(540/800/570)
TOEFL: 101
Top 6th high school in taiwan

It’s different, I guess

@osuprof

Could you please share the links for those datapoints?

@Pras2016,

What I have written is just curve fitting on top of results people have posted in this forum (and some outcomes I have known otherwise) . Also, I had posted earlier a board of trustees document that outlined their goals for next 5 years, and it mostly featured fraction of students in top 10% of their HS class, fraction of students in top 25% of their HS class, average ACT/SAT, and increasing the number of out-of-state students as well as minorities, first generation students, and Pell grant awardees (search for a thread I titled `os admission thinking’.

Im posting for my friend: 3.9 GPA 25 ACT. Not sure what ECs but very involved all 4 years. Exploratory major and was accepted last month.

Coming from nationally ranked high school and one of the best high schools NJ, which does not rank students: of 8 students accepted to OSU, only 2 would fall close to 25% of their class based on GPA. The rest middle of the pack. Leaves me to wonder if OSU weighs HS rank as heavily for those coming from highly competitive high schools.

This is very interesting - thank you for compiling @osuprof!

Out of State California, and I just got into college of engineering I believe. It doesn’t say otherwise. I’m definitely not top 10% of my class, very competitive public school in Northern California. 29 ACT, 3.77 weighted. Technically first generation college student and two sport Varsity Captain.

@osuprof after reading a lot of the threads it seems that OSU gives a lot of weight to the competitiveness and quality of the applicant’s high school and the proven track record of applicants from a particular high school. Perhaps they have a good idea of how first years (freshman) perform from the different high schools. This would explain why some applicants who meet the criteria you suggest are put into the University Exploration program instead of College of Engineering or other programs they requested, or perhaps that is why some applicants are rejected or deferred instead of accepted during Early Action. Another reason is consideration of other admissions holistic factors like extracurricular & leadership activities, work experience, etc…

I would agree with the competitiveness of the high school also being a key component. My daughter goes to a very competitive private school in our city that doesn’t rank and was admitted in the first round with a 32 ACT and 3.95 GPA and received the Maximus scholarship and National Buckeye. We know students from other high schools both public and private in our city that are in the top 25% of their class but were deferred with similar GPAs and ACT scores.

It sounds about right. My DD was deferred. Doubtful that OSU has a ton of data on a HS in New Hampshire. Interestingly, her senior class was unusually competitive as she was told that her GPA would have her well inside the top 10% of last years class. Unfortunately, schools will not pick up on an anomaly of this type. Fingers crossed with 4 other acceptances to fall back on!

My son applied to COE and got accepted into Exploration. He might be the first student from his private school to apply.
3.25 u/w GPA.
SAT: 630 CR and 780 M.
AP Math and Science.