I’m a high school student who will be attending my local community college this coming fall. I am a honors student with priority registration, but my school isn’t a member of UCLA’s TAP. Ideally, I plan to transfer to UCLA as a Psychobiology major in two years, but I have UC Davis TAG’d just in case.
Even if I take all the Recommended Major Prep listed on Assist.org AND all the required IGETC, i’ll have around 74 semester units (or 111 quarters units) by the time I transfer. This seems pretty decent, but according to UCLA’s profile of admitted transfer students for 2014, the average quarter units for a accepted transfer student was 115:
Sadly, they stopped adding the average units of accepted students in future reports.
From your experience, does the number of units taken over the needed coursework effect your competitiveness for admission? If so, would it be worth the extra work to take some blow off classes to raise my competitiveness?
The minimum is 60 semester units/90 quarter units. That is, you’ll get automatically rejected if you don’t have those.
Don’t worry about averages, usually it takes some time for people to figure their stuff out. I know I’m going to be transferring with like 90 semester units. People change their majors, take extra classes they’re interested in, etc and accumulate extra units.
To answer your last question, no blow off classes won’t matter. What matters is 60/90 units, IGETC (or similar), and pre-req courses as well as any school-specific courses they require from transfers. You will not be competitive with 5 extra units from a cooking class.
All you need is 60/90. Just make sure you have a strong GPA in those college courses while in high school. A lot of high schoolers don’t do as well for whatever reason (meaning Bs), and they later regret those courses.
60/90. I agree with @Ohm888 please don’t take classes now just because you can, only take them if they will help you, not hurt you. (Learn from my mistakes lol.)
As has been said above, 60/90 units is the minimum. I had 100 semester units when I finally had a successful transfer though. However, in my first application cycle, I didn’t technically have 60/90 UC transferable units. I was bit under. Oddly enough, I was accepted to UCSD for computer science that year. I did have over 60/90 if you counted CSU-only units though. Perhaps that could explain the oversight? Nevertheless, I chose not to risk accepting the offer as I’m sure UCSD would have noticed when they did a more thorough review of my transcripts.
Actually they do make minute exceptions some of the time. You can’t count on it, though. You could have brought it to their attention and see what they said. However, you now have a cushion and less classes to take at the UC, so that’s probably better.