^ I meant holistic admissions goes well beyond adding the essay to the stats. It’s about the whole kid. I meant the ECs and LORs matter. I got the impression you were viewing holistic as the essay being the differentiator. True holistic admissions is about way more than that. (personally I don’t think UF is that holistic. Quite difficult for such large schools to be.
I’m not an expert on UF. There are others that can be of more help, but your kid’s grades are great!! SAT is a little low I think. That’s where other things will help.
@Anisqoyo That sounds like west shore high school type numbers. A school of choice in Melbourne always in the top three of Florida high schools and sometimes number one. Every class is an ap and it’s a lottery school. 100 percent college matriculation. 10 perfect 4.0 uw. Usually 13 aps minimum. That type of school is really hard to compare to the average excellent school. Even the private schools.
UF does not require or accept letters of recommendation for undergrad admissions. That definitely frees up some time to read essays.
Based on Naviance data from my own child’s high school, it looks to me that GPA is weighted most heavily, with practically everyone accepted above a certain threshold (even a student with 1200 SAT scores). Similarly, above a certain (high) SAT/ACT threshold, >1530/35, it seems just about everyone is accepted (though a few low GPA students were rejected). There is a large area in the GPA/score matrix, though, where the results are mixed.
My take is that UF does a first pass based on GPA and scores, throwing away some good portion of the applications, and accepting most of the very high GPA and test score kids formulaically. Then they get into the holistic review, really looking closely at kids in the middle of the matrix.
@GatorDad305 - Our college guidance counselor shares that information with us along with admin stats for all the other schools where our students have applied. If you look in Naviance, there’s a scattergram that will provide you with the total number of students from your school that applied to each college, how many were accepted and how many enrolled. It will also show the GPA and ACT/SAT score for each student that applied (not by name), as well as which ones were accepted, deferred and then enrolled. I don’t know if that is true for all schools, or just for ours, because our school willingly shares that info.
@jhmoney - I sat through the same Admin presentation with my son in Gainesville this spring. I don’t believe they read 40K essays even one time. No way. I do believe, however, that once they select the applications that meet their statistical threshold that they pay much closer attention to the essay. Again, though, our school had 89 admitted to UF last year and there is no way each essay was outstanding. More important, in my humble opinion, is the fact that our average SAT is 1385 and average ACT is 31. I agree with the other poster who said that UF is much more stats driven than they want us to believe. Holistic is a nice thing to be able to claim, but doing it with 40K applicants just isn’t in the realm of possibility.
When it comes to the honors program I think all bets are off. I’m pretty certain that the honors school limits the number of students from each high school and that essays are just as important as stats. I did have one honors program administrator tell me that 25% of the students admitted to the honors program earned at least a 1590 on their SAT and a 36 on their ACT. Having students read and evaluate the essays of applicants to the honors program devalued the program in my mind. Turning this from an academic driven program into a creative writing club, evaluated by group think, left my son with little desire to even apply. Having the students in the room who were our honors program tour guides (and honors program essay evaluators) lecture us about the importance of making them like the essay produced more than a few eye rolls.
I don’t think UF even accepts LOR’s. Again, this is because of the time constraints in evaluating so many applications. I may be wrong here, but I believe the admin officer said that LOR’s don’t matter at UF.
@jhmoney , your daughter’s grades and course rigor are stellar, but you really want her to increase that SAT if at all possible. Just as a point of reference, our kids all got in with a minimum GPA of 4.45, but they all had SAT’s of 1350 or higher and the lowest ACT was 32.
@privatebanker - Yes, it is one of the top schools in Florida, which is why they have a lot of success admitting students into UF. My point was to show that UF is fairly consistent with the percentage of students applying that are accepted. It would be fascinating to know if these schools are held to a higher statistical threshold than other schools and if those rejected from my son’s school would have been accepted had they applied from a different school.
Just a few years ago, BF was about $3200, which was certainly nice but often other schools could make up that different to top students. Now the value of BF is $7000+. It is much harder to give that up and go to a school that might cost 3 to 4 times as much. We were able to make a private school work with BF, the Florida resident grant and the aid from the school, but if it would have been the choice of full tuition and books at a public school, I think we would have opted for UF or one of the other other big publics. I think more kids are staying instate, which makes it harder to get in.
I do not think UF takes the top 10% of the high schools and everyone else is automatically excluded. As someone said above, there is probably a cutoff at maybe the top 25% based on stats, and then the rest of the application has to shine.
@Anisqoyo are you thinking 1330-1350 with her gpa of 4.63 UF recalculated. Is there any shot for her with a 1310 and her gpa? If her recent test score doesn’t improve ?
@dropbox77177 Is my daughters gpa one of those you consider to be at the top? 4.63. Even though her SAT is 1310. I’m not even sure what people Think are the top anymore. ?
@Anisqoyo what about her gpa and SAT for PACE program ?
@jhmoney - If that 4.63 GPA is a UF recalculated GPA (only academic courses, +0.5 for honors, +1.0 for AP/DE, and ignore +'s and -'s), then yes for sure that is a “super” top GPA. At my child’s school, every single applicant with GPA that high was accepted to UF, even one with ACT 21 and SAT 1120. (Our school adheres pretty closely to the UF methodology, so weighted GPAs are pretty comparable to UF-recalculated GPAs, though not exact of course.)
Looking at SAT 1310, about half of the applicants got into UF from our school, but all of them with GPAs above about 4.1. It’s a rigorous private high school, with a little grade deflation I’d say, but all in all I think your daughter should be ok. I hope that helps.
100% agree with @dropbox77177 's comment: “Based on Naviance data from my own child’s high school, it looks to me that GPA is weighted most heavily, with practically everyone accepted above a certain threshold (even a student with 1200 SAT scores). Similarly, above a certain (high) SAT/ACT threshold, >1530/35, it seems just about everyone is accepted (though a few low GPA students were rejected). There is a large area in the GPA/score matrix, though, where the results are mixed.”
That has also been my observation over the last few years.
What I also believe is important for people like @jhmoney , is that your daughter is really competing against her peers in her school, not the average GPA and SAT of last year’s overall UF class. Every high school is different and, I believe, looked at independently from other high schools. Not every school offers or allows students to take 13+ APs, as another post states. So, your daughter’s GPA will not be compared to someone at that school’s GPA. I believe that GPA, in comparison to others in the same high school, is the highest weighing factor and SAT/ACT is a distant second.
@dropbox77177 @fl1234 yes I recalculated my daughters gpa utilizing the .5 bump for honors and the 1 point bump for AICE AP and Dual enrollment. The only class I did not include in her calculation was as Art Class given to her in her freshmen’s. Year. Outside of that every class was an academic class as far as her competing with kids in her own school , this is the same as I have been told. This past year 35 kids got accepted into UF. Currently my daughter is ranked 15/564 kids in her grade based on the the schools weighted GpA. The 14 kids in front of her have straight A’s while my daughter got 2 B’s here entire career in AP classes. Assuming being ranked 15/565 is good enough against her peers. Her community service hours is 280 hours. She also played 3 years tennis and 2 years flag footballl of varsity sports for leadership she started a club at her school and is the president of the club national honor society etc etc
@Anisqoyo @fl1234 How does Naviance compute GPA? Is it programmed to figure the SUS/UF recalculated formula? Also, has the yield been consistent year over year?
My best guess is that UF’s decision process is, indeed, holistic but also driven hard by data and automation of the admissions process. Several big software/CRM companies offer programs to help schools with recruiting, admission, enrollment management, etc. This software also uses AI to try to limit biases – which is a big deal for universities.
I believe UF does read essays and does evaluate ECs. This information is likely given some type of numerical “score” which is then combined within admissions software with other scores for grades/rigor/scores, etc. to evaluate candidates -both against the entire applicant pool and their high school counterparts.
Essay/ECs/Etc. are therefore more important for kids with lower grades/scores.
The process must be highly automated… one guy’s opinion.
@GatorDad305 I asked that question last February when we sat in the Reitz union during a leadership Conference. they had UF admissions come talk to the parents. I said do you have software which basically weeds out or puts the low end gpa/sat into a bucket or eliminate them off the bat. And conversely for high achievers? . She said I wish. She said they spend many hours through the Christmas, weekends and New Years holidays reading everyones app. My friend who use to do admissions for UPenn said reviewing an app for 1 minute is considering reading/reviewing it. They first look at the profile. If it isn’t up to snuff they scan and move on. So to say they put 100% effort into every single app is just not possible. I could be wrong but there has to be software that eliminates based on GPa SaT and maybe comparing peers at your own school ? Using AI is not being holistic. That’s using raw data and stats. How does AI know what a flub is they someone started at a school
@GatorDad305 I could be wrong it just seems like a daunting task. Thoughts ?
@GatorDad305 I am not an expert in Naviance and my kids’ school has only used it for a couple of years. We don’t have the scatter plots that other schools have on it to show GPA/SAT and whether students were accepted or not because it is a new resource to them and they don’t have the history to draw from. It is also a small high school, so there is not a lot of data to begin with. I believe that someone inputs the GPAs and SAT/ACT scores into Naviance, in our case the GC. It is not a tool/site specific to UF, so they input the unweighted and weighted GPA for all classes with the high school’s methodology for weighting, not UF’s methodology.
meant to say how does AI know what club someone started at a school? what it truly means or what the club does? unfortunately we all have 5 more months of this 
@jhmoney - I can’t speak to the PACE program because I’ve never looked into it. The information I have regarding GPA and SAT/ACT scores come only from our school. The cut off for acceptance to UF for students applying from this school last year was a weighted GPA of 4.45 (NOT UF recalculated) and a SAT score of 1350/ACT 32.
We had students with 4.4 GPA’s and 1325 SAT scores that were denied admission. So I think it may be that UF has different standards for different schools, or else they limit acceptances by school. With your D’s GPA (which is an exceptional score after UF recalculation) she should probably be accepted. If her SAT score was at the middle 50 percent (1330), it would only make it more likely.