Engineering Admission Statistics 2018

Anomalous numbers and annotations.

When compiling the stats I noticed some oddities that I corrected for as noted here below.

  1. CWRU listed 26k applications to engineering… which is more than Berkeley. CWRU is less than 50% engineering. Looking at news articles the total number of applicants for all majors last year was 26k. CWRU has consistently misreported this stat in past years. I did not list this stat on the table. And CWRU engineering admit rate is probably about 10% higher than the listed number.

  2. U Texas Austin listed their avg SAT as 1475 which is about 100 points higher than past years’ reportings… and no appreciable increase in applications. The past years reports are upper 1300s. I figure someone submitted their avg admissions stat range instead of actual enrolled. I gave UT half credit. Which boosted their avg SAT 50 points from the normal 1400ish range. A yearly 10 to 20 point increase is understandable, but 100pts? nope. That could only happen if the entire upper quartile of admitted applicants accepted and the lower quartiles went somewhere else.

  3. UCLA listed number of applications as “26”… which I guessed meant 26k.

  4. Schools listing only ACT scores were scaled from the lower end of the comparable SAT range. Example 36 is 1550 not 1600. 35 is a 1490…

  5. Stanford, Harvard, and U Florida did not give SAT scores or application stats. I gathered the numbers from yearly general admission articles. U Florida’s engineering admit rate is most likely lower than 30%.

That is all.

@firmament2x
I think there’s a plausible explanation as to why the engineering school’s score is so much higher than the rest at UCLA. I forgot that 40% of the student body are Asians and prop 209 bars UCs from considering race in admission. Out of those 40% (also among the highest scoring within the student body), a lot are concentrated in the engineering school. I was surprised initially but once I recall this, it makes sense.

@RichInPitt . . . I can’t buy into what you’re saying…

Here’s my quote with yours following:

I agree that the probability would be pretty remote that the reported number would end in a five if it were a median. And since most of the colleges in the Greymeer’s data have SATs ending in five, it does come into question. I stated what I did without perusing all the scores.

But, too, what would be the chance of many colleges rounding its SATs to a five rather than a zero (or more likely rounding up)? Not very… I believe the answer is that since they’re so used to reporting their SATs in a 75th and 25th percentile format, that they’ve become a bit lazy and have just taken the mid point of those two markers, which would be an egregious error because they would most likely be shortchanging themselves, because the higher scores should have a greater density and so the median score should be closer to the 75th. That still wouldn’t explain, though, why the predominant number of scores in the data have scores ending in five, because there would seemingly be a 50-50 chance that there would be a trailing five or a zero, not predominantly ending in five as here.

If these are indeed means and not medians, then the numbers would be much better for all, because just about all schools, probably with the exception of Cal Tech and Harvey Mudd who would probably have a pretty even and high distribution of scores all throughout its freshmen E students because of there are essentially no legacies, athletes, etc, as with the others.

You are correct wrt to 3). The number of applications for UCLA’s E majors totaled 26,195 for 2018-19. Your number for E majors minus CS is correct also: 3,924 total E majors - 884 CS majors = 3,040.

Re, 4), I don’t agree with this. A 36 should be a 1,600 and nothing else; a 35 should be ~ 1,560 or a 1,570; a 34, 1,510; a 33, 1,460. But if you’re the one who did the conversions, I like that you did because it puts all on the same plane of comparison.

@IWannaHelp, per your quote:

You keep digging your ditch deeper and deeper. Actually, for the undergrad student body as a whole, whites and Asians comprise about the same percentage, about 26-28%. For the incoming freshman class it’s more comprised of Asians but the percentage isn’t 40%. White students are more concentrated in xfers. The university counts Internationals as a separate category as do all universities, and many of them are from Asia, specifically the People’s Republic of China, which means the 27% of Asian students would indeed be higher, but it wouldn’t be 40%. I’m guessing you cited your number without any forethought

Penn State (1195 SAT) & Iowa State (1168 SAT) have surprisingly low SAT scores.

Some schools have only application to the school as a whole, not to a specific division or major. Although using total number of applications is clearly inaccurate for such a school that is not all engineering, any other way of reporting would be just an estimate, since intended major listed on the application is not binding and may not be accurate (especially “undecided”).

Concordance from ACT and CB shows the following:


ACT     SAT range       SAT single score
36      1570-1600       1590
35      1530-1560       1540
34      1490-1520       1500
33      1450-1480       1460
32      1420-1440       1430
31      1390-1410       1400
30      1360-1380       1370

https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/ACT-SAT-Concordance-Tables.pdf
https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/guide-2018-act-sat-concordance.pdf

Note, however, that some colleges may have different concordances. For example, https://www2.calstate.edu/apply/eligibility-index/Documents/eligibility-index.pdf suggests that the CSUs in California consider 1600 SAT to be equivalent to 35 ACT, as these are the scores needed for an out-of-state frosh applicant with a 2.47 HS GPA (recalculated) to be minimally eligible (depending on impaction for the selected campus and major, such an applicant may not necessarily be admitted, but is admissible to a non-impacted major at a non-impacted campus).

@firmament2x

The stats I saw apparently was 10 years old so that was my mistake.

That said, I am actually not convinced UCLA number is correct (it’s not correct for quite a few schools for sure, as mentioned in earlier post).

UCLA shows the following mid-50 quantiles for admits and enrolled (2018)
Admit 1370-1540
Enrolled 1280-1510

It would be a very skewed student body if the engineering school average is more than the 75th percentile of the university. Not impossible but very unlikely. In fact, for fall 2015, here are the ADMIT stats:

75th percentile for the university: 2250 (UCLA admission site)
Median SAT for engineering: 2190 (Wikipedia) which is 60 points LOWER than the 75th percentile.

If you extrapolate that for the 2018 enrolled stats, the score for the engineering school should be more like 1450, not 1515.

@IWannaHelp . . . thank you for the more concerted effort…

I’m not sure as to what you’re referring. What quote and what post?

Your referenced numbers are from UCLA’s Admissions website. On its CDS, UCLA presumably corrected its reportage of the 25th and 75th percentiles to 1,270/1,520 for the enrolled.

Per UCLA’s CDS the 75th reported was 1,520 for all 6,240 freshmen. So E’s is not higher for one. The 1,520 score would apply for 1,560 students and most likely further down because it could have descended, say to the 72nd.

There were 924 E majors who enrolled in 2018 also. And since this is a median, who knows what scores lie below the 50th percentile minus one student, since the median is 1,515 which splits two scores above and below this median since the there are an even number of E students.

This student obviously had a 1,510 score, but for all we know, all the ones below him or her could have had a 900 SAT. That’s obviously not the case, but a median only purports to any sense of veracity in the exact middle; it isn’t an average which encompasses all scores – therefore a mean is a much higher standard of measurement.

So with this in mind, the average could very well dip into the late 1400’s, and I’m sure it does, say, something like a 1,487 average. But the median is most likely indeed a 1,515.

Additionally, how many scored at least 1,500 for this particular E class? I think a good number would be 60-65%. That means 554-601 students scored > or = 1,500. Subtract this from the student body as a whole who scored 1,500 or > and you have at least 959-1,006 non-E students who scored 1,520 or greater.

The median SAT for UCLA for all students is > 1,400, and it would be > 1,440 if the University superscored. An it has nothing to do with race, though UCLA does have a good number of South and East Asian students, who for the good part score extremely well.

You’re “extrapolating” data for the E admits from 2015 to E enrolled for 2018. I don’t think this is legitimate because of a few factors: one, the ascension of the E school within this period, and two, the increased E scholarships within this same period. I’ll backtrack and answer your quote above because I thought this had to do with that prior quote.

Btw, I saw this writeup on wiki, but I didn’t reference it in any way. I referenced a prior thread on the UCLA board in College Confidential by a poster in the EE program.

@ucbalumnus . . . beautiful writeup. I don’t have the time to peruse it right now, but I will in the next couple days.

@IWannaHelp . . . the following paragraph should manifest the following correction:

Additionally, how many scored at least 1,500 for this particular E class? I think a good number would be 60-65%. That means 554-601 students scored > or = 1,500. Subtract this from the student body as a whole who scored 1,500 or > and you have at least 959-1,006 non-E students who scored 1,500 or greater.

Add note: It’s 1,500 not 1,520 partly because I added the “at least 959-1,006…” part, besides my redundant mention of 1,500 scores.

@ucbalumnus . . .

The testing board obviously associates percentiles of those who’ve taken the tests from one board to the other and comes up with the concordances, and I’m sure they change from year to year. There are a lot of mismatching conversions. I’d like to see the ACT change to adding another 0 behind its scores; I guess something somewhat like the MCAT did; I think this would help considerably.

On UCLA’s CDS for 2018-19, I was noticing that something like 59% of the students who took the SAT had scores of 700 and > for the math portion, and 51% for the Reading and Writing. (Without superscoring as UC doesn’t allow this.) But on those who’d taken the ACT, there were higher scores for the English part. Besides being confused, as the math scores tend to be higher on both boards by all students, I believe this shows that there was a subset of UCLA students took the ACT to try possibly to boost their math scores and reported both. Or they were successful in boosting their English scores, so they reported both. I don’t know which to believe.

^^^ In the last two sentences above “reported both” s/b “reported both [boards on their applications].” Apologize for my writing taking a turn decidedly southward.

@firmament2x

I still think 1515 is likely too high. That was 2018 number, not 2019, so the median of admitted is not as high as the 1540 they advertised for 2019 (even that is not really official). Once you factor the relatively low yield, especially among OOS and instate, the melt between admitted and enrolled is likely 40 points or more. See the differences between admitted and enrolled in their profiles page year after year, particularly in the 25th percentile).

That said, I did forget that the extrapolation should be 40 instead of 60 points as the 60 points was based on three sections. They would bring it to 1470 instead.

@IWannaHelp . . .

Here’s the [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCLA_Henry_Samueli_School_of_Engineering_and_Applied_Science)to the Wiki article you said you referenced. The noted statistics of 4.00/4.59/1,540 were for the admitted E-class for the fall of 2018 (the academic year of 2018-19), which matches the year for Greymeer’s data.

The EE major whose thread I referenced and from which I took the 2018 E-class numbers matched precisely. It’s a little too early to cull numbers for the 2019 entering class as UCLA hasn’t begun its fall term just yet, and there will be some students who’ve IR’ed but may not show up, a small number certainly, but the stats for the freshman class of 2019 won’t be generated until later in the year.

And I purposely overstated the number of 1,500 scores for E students just to try to prove your point, that the reputed scores for the E students would leave the rest of the student body bereft of any kind of standard. It appears, though, that the median for the rest of the student body would still be in the 1,400 range and certainly higher if UCLA superscored.

With this said, I would say that if the 1,515 median is true for E students at UCLA – and I believe it is – then the truer percentage of E students with ≥ 1,500 would be closer to 55-60% depending on if I were to compute the number of 1,510 and 1,500 scores using a flat distribution or a slightly downside of a normal (parabolic) curve.

Honestly, I don’t know a great deal of statistics and have to rely on intuition beyond the elemental things I’ve learned, so if someone who’s more well-versed in Stats has any corrections, please advise.

Soooo I have a 3.65 weighted gpa with a 3.32 unweighted, I got a 27 on my ACT would that get me into Tennessee, Alabama, or Clemson for Civil Engineering?

@aaaaaahhhhhh

A 27 in ACT corresponds to the range of 1210 - 1240 in SAT. The average SATs of the incoming engineering students in these schools are below 1240:

University of South Carolina (1062.5);
Iowa State University (1168.75);
The Pennsylvania State University (1195); (no campus was specified)
University of Arkansas (1232.5)
The University of Alabama (1232.5);
Louisiana State University (1240)

Interestingly, the average SAT at the University of Tennessee is listed in the table as 1508.75, which is inconsistent with its difficulty in admission ranking of 40, because the SATs for other schools with an difficulty in admission ranking of 40 are all in the 1300 to 1400 range.
Clemson comes in with a 1355.