<p>So, what you are saying is that one needs a passable personal essay to get reviewed by the committee? </p>
<p>I am sorry, that might be true for the scholarship thingy, but rejecting anybody without looking at GPA sounds weird. Like it or not, GPA has the biggest correlation with higher success in upper division classes. It is like a regression model. ( I am not saying high lower diviosn GPA causes high upper division success)</p>
<p>Ok its believable that if someone’s essays are horrible enough, then yea they would probably get rejected even if they have a 4.0. But how many 4.0 students submit horrible essays?</p>
<p>Ah I get it. I bet a lot of East Coast students or international students with 4.0s apply to Berkeley just for fun and they free-write their essays. The UCs are known as being easy to apply to. That could explain it.</p>
<p>@nero103: I believe that either you misunderstood my post or I wasn’t clear enough. No one is rejected outright on the basis of their personal statement. Decisions are made after a review of the total application materials. However, the first eyes in the review process are the readers. They are the first line in the process. They assign the first scores which are used in the process. Later, when the selection committee sits down to review the applications, they first note the scores given by the readers. However, if they find the rest of the application acceptable but still have questions about the candidate’s suitability they will read the essay to gauge if the readers properly scored the personal statement in the first place (they’ll be looking first at uniformity between the readers before assigning their own marks).</p>
<p>@smith415: I agree that most candidates with 4.0s are capable of writing adequate essays at the very least. I believe that timing comes in to play in some cases. UC applications are submitted earlier than for most private universities. Many 4.0 students have their sights set on a Stanford/Cornell/MIT (etc.) transfer and devote themselves to working on the supplemental essays for these schools, hastily writing their statement for the UC application as the deadline comes due with bits pulled from these other essays. This can lead to a disjointed essay that might be scored harshly.</p>
<p>p.s. This is strictly for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Other colleges (Haas, COE, CNR, etc.) have different criteria and might be somewhat less holistic in their approach.</p>
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<p>I’ve read his essays and they were amazingly well-written or at the very least decent enough to get him accepted. He had all the prereqs done but the only flaw I saw in his application was that he had very little math (up to college algebra and basically minimum required science) and took statistics(and those two lab sciences) at the final semester (which he aced). But I think those reqs were only needed for IGETC and not core reqs. But I thought math and science had very little to do w/ his major so I didnt think much of it when I saw that his GPA = 4.0.</p>