Chance Me! UW Seattle - undecided major

Hi! I will be applying to UW Seattle at the end of the month and I’m hoping somebody can give me some honest feedback about my chances of getting in as an out of state student.

Asian, Female

GPA: 3.6 UW

ACT: 34

8 AP classes + 5 more senior year: Mostly 4s and 5s with one 3

2 AP scholars with distinction, Member of NHS

ECs: Varsity swim team, Varsity downhill ski team and captain, Varsity golf team and captain,
Youth In Government: twice-elected official, state steering committee, local leadership team,
Editor-In-Chief of high school newspaper,
250+ volunteer hours,
Worked as a ski instructor (6 years) and swim instructor (2 years),
12 years of Chinese school (fluent),
On leadership team of mental health initiative at my high school,
Student election judge

Essay: pretty strong (I would give it a B+/A-)

Recommendations: Councilor - very good, Teachers - 1 very good, 1 pretty good

Thank you!!

Hi! I am also looking to apply to UW (class of 2026 though). Your ECs seem great (I know students who got in with less, but they were in-state).

Stat-wise, I can’t really judge how you’ll do (but a 34 ACT is awesome regardless!), so here is UW’s official admit stats.

https://admit.washington.edu/apply/freshman/by-the-numbers/

Just from looking, it appears that your GPA is a bit lower than the average OOS applicant, but your ACT once again is great. Somebody who’s more experienced here may want to comment on the balance between those two.

Best of luck!
Aryakhan81

The ACT score will not be seen this year in the first round of decisions. They will be test score blind and not even see the scores if submitted. After they have made their accept/waitlist/deny decisions, they will then revisit the waitlist applications, sort by submitted test score and re-evaluate the very top scores to see if it moves the candidate up to the accept pile. So only a very small percentage of applicants will have their test score evaluated.

@vannevka - Where did you read that UW is test blind? I understood they were test-optional. I’m probably in the minority here, but my son’s test scores were really going to help him w/engineering admissions.

@NWExpat This summer/early fall the admissions dept had a lot of Wed evening zooms on different subjects. During one of those, they explained how they were going to handle the test scores this year. They made it clear that for general UW admissions, they will be test blind and will only end up looking at a very small subset of scores–those waitlisted and who submitted very high scores to reevaluate if they would change their decision to accept.

Since my daughter will not be applying to a direct admit major, I do not recall if they talked about the direct-admit admissions for engineering, CS or business. All I know about that is, for those that list one of those majors as first choice, once they’ve been accepted to the university, they send the file over to the different schools for evaluation of direct admit. In the past, those schools only saw the transcripts, test scores and some sort of number rating given by admissions dept for the essays (they do not read the essays–at least business does not). Therefore, engineering could still evaluate test scores for direct admit acceptance, I just don’t know that info.

ok. I just found the part of their website where they explain Test-optional: https://admit.washington.edu/apply/freshman/how-to-apply/test-scores/

We are all wondering how schools will manage this behind the scenes and your explanation from the webinars is useful (even if it is likely to hurt my son’s chances). We live in CA and most schools here are test-blind.

Just to add on as well, I’ve emailed my admissions officer that I wanted to submit my test scores and they said they’re test blind and will not consider it for my admission process.

Oh that’s a bummer for my son. Same in his home state. A bit painful to know we’ll be on the hook for private or OOS tuition despite his efforts to study for and perform well on the tests. His HS is tough and GPA is admirable, but not 4++. Glad to hear they might look at apps on the fence as it seems foolish to turn away ACT 36 due to a couple of Bs. It’s tough all around also for students who studied and had tests canceled and could not find out how well they night do.