<p>Ask any college admissions officer about CA grade inflation. A 4.2 at a CA public school often is not top 10%. It’s mad, and I agree with epiphany that it seems largely due to underfunding. Crowded, underfunded schools dummy down.</p>
<p>I think CA is just doing what most good state schools have always done-largely support the in state students with out of state dollars. They were pretty much alone in populating their state schools with a vast majority of in state students. It’s a bitter pill for CA to swallow, but the schools would have gotten increasingly bad for all without the OOS dollars. The speed at which they’re doing it will leave many kids who assumed a good UC placement based in their school’s historical data on the sidelines.</p>
<p>California taxpayers have decided that other things are of higher priority than higher education (e.g. $1,000,000+ (25+ years at $40,000+ per year) to lock up an older criminal who has downgraded to petty theft), so that means less funding for higher education, which means higher in-state tuition and fewer places for in-state students.</p>
<p>I’m still waiting. I don’t doubt there may be grade inflation, but if it’s so apparent someone should be able to point me to some controlled data.fairly easily.</p>
<p>Are we saying that we could not find enough OOS(non international students) to fill those UC seats? </p>
<p>Global awareness- over rated. How many of those wealthy Asians mingle with the masses? To promote global awareness could be accomplished by doing more equal exchange student programs - school X in Australia takes 50, school Y in the US takes 50, no additional tuition required.</p>
<p>BTW- increaasing GPA by itself is not necessarily evidence of grade inflation if it is not normalief against another benchmark of performance IMO.</p>
<p>UC admissions GPA counts only up to 8 semesters’ worth of honors/AP/college course bonus points. So the maximum possible UC admissions GPA is, for most practical purposes, probably around a 4.4, assuming 8 semesters’ worth of honors/AP/college courses in a total of 20 semesters’ worth of a-g subject requirement courses in 10th and 11th grades, all with A grades.</p>
<p>That is a lot less than the 4.8 fully weighted GPAs, or the 5.something GPAs some are reporting with some high schools’ odd weighting systems.</p>
<p>It’s certainly not in CA’s best interest to circulate such data and who else would do it? Start with your own school profile to see grade distribution. Look at the stats of accepted kids at mid tier UCs-4.0 plus with 1800s SATs.</p>
<p>Why is this a surprise? Also among those being “squeezed out” are other “high-achieving” California residents, “(many of them children of immigrants), who for decades flocked to the state’s elite public colleges to move up the economic ladder.”</p>
<p>Indeed, I predicted this very thing 3+ years ago when UC announced its policy of chasing OOS wealthy students. But the Regents and Legislative Leaders don’t care, as long as UC Merced has beds to fill. (UC needs a rationale to explain its debacle in the valley.)</p>
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<p>The 8 point bonus cap is solely for the calculation of “UC gpa” which determines minimal eligibility for UC (and Cal States, for that matter). Holistic admissions are based on all gpa’s, however, including weighted, uncapped. (The Admissions reader receives all gpa’s, weighted-capped, weighted-uncapped, unweighted, AND the rank of the applicant compared to all other students from that HS who apply to UC.)</p>
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<p>Hasn’t been our (albeit limited) experience in SoCal.</p>
<p>I’m not so sure that’s true. The UCs stand out among the apps that my daughter completed in that they (1) don’t require letters of recommendation, and (2) strongly urge applicants not to send any supplemental materials. </p>
<p>Moreover, I spoke to an AO at UCLA and he explicitly said that they look first at rigor of curriculum, secondly at grades in the a-g core classes, and that “holistic” factors mostly only come into play as a tie-breaker. (This was an AO in the School of Engineering, so perhaps things are different in L&S and other subject areas.)</p>
<p>Of course he “said” that…it is official UC policy.</p>
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<p>But what he didn’t say is that such holistic factors can easily over-ride academic rigor. (If “mostly” means 51%+, then the rest can be <49% which fills a lot of slots.)</p>
<p>But yes, Eng schools are a lot more numbers-focused for guys (but are more ‘holistic’ for females).</p>
<p>Note that “holistic” in the UC sense is not as unpredictable and opaque as at many private schools. According to the [Hout</a> report](<a href=“http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/committees/aepe/hout_report.pdf]Hout”>http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/committees/aepe/hout_report.pdf), each application is read by two readers and scored (if there is a big difference in scoring, a senior reader reads it and scores it). Then all of the applications are ranked by the score and the top scoring ones taken (different divisions (L&S, Engineering, etc.) at a given campus may have different thresholds for acceptance). Presumably, this reduces the problem of “the sixth oboe player getting less consideration merely for being the sixth (as opposed to first) oboe player in the stack of applications”.</p>
<p>bluebayou – the AO didn’t just say it. He showed me his charts from last year’s admissions cycle. </p>
<p>Highest GPA/hi SAT students all got in, with almost no exceptions. Low GPA/low SAT students all didn’t, with very few exceptions. Students in the mid-band sometimes got in and sometimes didn’t. The “holistic” evaluation applies to those 10~20% of students that are in the middle.</p>
<p>"Are we saying that we could not find enough OOS(non international students) to fill those UC seats? </p>
<p>Global awareness- over rated. How many of those wealthy Asians mingle with the masses? To promote global awareness could be accomplished by doing more equal exchange student programs - school X in Australia takes 50, school Y in the US takes 50, no additional tuition required."</p>
<p>I agree with Oldfort on this. My daughter goes to a large private university in the Northeast and there is very little interaction between the International Asian students, accepted in record numbers last year, and the rest of the student body. They are so cliquey that they create resentment amongst the other students, especially among Asian-Americans. My daughter has told me of several incidents involving groups of International Asians that I find disturbing, such as groups of girls walking side by side with arms locked, completely blocking the entire sidewalk, forcing other students to step off the sidewalk into the street. Or taking up entire seating areas in the dining halls and the library, blocking others from using empty seats. Same thing in lecture halls, they will block the entrance to the rows, even if there are empty seats. Some are quite rude, talking loudly amongst themselves during class and in the library. These students do not seem to be interested in cultural exchange and act as if they are better than the rest of the student body. This attitude was not something we were aware of and has come as quite a surprise to my daughter, who has never encountered anything like this before. She went to a very racially diverse public high school and has never experienced anything like this before.</p>
<p>I strongly feel that public universities should first serve the qualified students of their state, then other American students. I understand the need for full pay students, but it should not be at the expense of qualified in-state students. Many excellent state universities have caps on the percentage of OOS students they accept. I have no problem with a diversified student body or holistic admissions, but I do have a problem with international students taking spots from well qualified American students at publicly funded universities.</p>
<p>At least in our S’s HS in CA, I don’t see any grade inflation. Getting A is actually really difficult even for top performing students due to high expectation of teachers. School allows only 4 to 5 maximum APs until Junior year, so having disadvantage in UC’s GPA calculation. This kind of info, I believe, is already known to UC schools. I mean they know how each school is grading and what kinds of courses are provided. Even with those disadvantages, S’s HS sends more than 100 students to Berkeley and UCLA, respectively.</p>
<p>Of course, when the people of the state keep reducing funding, should they be surprised that the state university offers less service (admission places, tuition discounts) to the people of the state?</p>
<p>OOS and International students are the holy grail to increasing revenue at public universities as states reduce higher ed funding. What else can they do?</p>
<p>UCs are daXCed if they do and daCXed if they don’t.</p>
<p>There are mainly two schools people OOS are interested in attending, Berkeley and UCLA. I know a few people from Texas shelling out the OOS tuition at these schools although I personally would not let my kid apply since we have equally good state schools. So I didn’t see a good reason to spend an extra 23k for this honor. I know at least one other Texas kid attending UCSD. I have not heard anyone ever talking about applying or going OOS to any of the other UCs.</p>
<p>I am guessing it is hard for some of the UCs to recruit OOS students who are willing to pay. What else are they to do?</p>
<p>Btw - U Texas is doing exactly the same thing - admit OOS and Internationals and charge them an extra 25k.</p>
<p>Do they look at test scores like SAT, SAT II, AP too in addition to grades and rigor? Because you said that they only look at GPA and rigor before going to other factors. That would suck if it’s true, because kids can just go to a public school with massive grade inflation, get a 4.5, get a 1800/2400 on the SAT, and still get in.</p>
<p>That “Field of Dreams” campus was dreamed up and funded into existence by the idiotic CA legislature, not the UC. It was created at the behest of a gang of Central Valley politicians, not the UC Regents. The university has merely compounded their error by subsequently pretending it thinks the Merced campus is somehow a good idea.</p>