<p>How selective is this? SAT scores? Grades etc?</p>
<p>To have your application considered by the Echols committee, your app needs to be a one-read admit. This means a combination of top SAT scores, top class rank, good ECs, great recs, great essays, etc. The Echols selection committee generally chooses about 1/3 of the applicants forwarded to it to be designated Echols Scholars. At that point, amongst applicants who all have great hard factors, soft factors like essays and recs become very, very important.</p>
<p>Basically, Echols Scholars are people who got into several other higher-ranked schools and/or had large scholarship offers (due to the factors I mentioned above.) Just within my suite, I know of acceptances to Georgetown, Chicago, Rice, Stanford, Duke, MIT, Columbia, Williams, Northwestern, Yale and Dartmouth - just to name a few. Most came here due to the lower cost of UVA relative to top privates (for both instate and oos people), the benefits of the Echols program, and/or because they just plain liked UVA.</p>
<p>are u an echols cav?</p>
<p>Yes, I am.</p>