<p>my counselor tells me that the top 4 things that UCs consider are GPA, SAT/ACT, AP tests and a-g courses. where do extra-curriculars factor into this ?</p>
<p>The 4 things that UCs really consider are GPA, SAT/ACT, AP/honors, and a-g courses. Like almost all public schools in the country, ECs barely factor in at all (except at Berkeley and LA).</p>
<p>what are q-g courses???
sorry im new to the country…</p>
<p>^
They’re the guidelines for high school education at all University of Californias and California State Universities. You need to complete all of them before you apply.</p>
<p>You can find them on a UC website. The ones I remember are:</p>
<p>4 years of english
Math up through Algebra 2
2 years of Science
2 years of foreign language
1 year of academic elective
1 year of art
2 years of history</p>
<p>Etc.</p>
<p>@amarkov: how do UCB and UCLA differ in their consideration of EC’s then?</p>
<p>UCLA and UCB are both competitive places to get in. They’ll pick the most outstanding applicants from the pool. And since there are so many high achieving/scoring students who apply to these two colleges, ECs have to factor in.</p>
<p>I’m not sure about the differences, but both are pretty erratic and unpredictable.</p>
<p>^^^^^^
That.</p>
<p>It’s very unclear how much precisely Berkeley and LA consider ECs. All that people really know for sure is that they both do much more than other UCs.</p>
<p>The other schools outside of Cal and UCLA produce a single numeric score for each applicant, using their own formulas and factors so that each campus selects uniquely, but at the other schools, everyone above the cutoff is admitted and everyone below the cutoff is rejected or waitlisted, sort of mechanically. </p>
<p>Most are pretty detailed and thus quite consistent from application to application - for example UCSD considers community service below 100 hours, even if at 99.99, to be worth zero. Anything from 100 to 199.99999 is worth half the potential points for the community service factor, anything from 200 to a zillion hours is the same full points added to the score. Leadership in a club that is not president or VP is ignored, zero points, no matter how many roles and how long they were undertaken. Assuming no error was made in spotting the conditions for which they assign points, the score someone gets should be very predictable and consistent between students. There are so many categories for things like veteran, hardship, coming from a poorly performing high school, extraordinary achievements, a high number of rigorous classes taken in HS, . . . . that the pattern if you look just at stats is confusing, but once you dive into the various factors from their well described process, you can pretty quickly understand how they handed out yes and no decisions. </p>
<p>Cal and UCLA have a more ‘Ivy’ style admissions - they assign a single digit number to applications, ranging from ‘not a chance’ to ‘pull out all the stops to recruit this student’, with lots of discussion, soft factors, and agonizing decisions for all those in the middle - good enough but too many of them for the spaces that will exist. There it can be the warmth and charm from an well written essay, or a particular pattern of interests that seems for consistent and passionate than other applications, or fit some grand objective of getting a desirable MIX of types of people, backgrounds, geographies, etc. </p>
<p>To that extent, just like at an Ivy, it is fairly subjective. Anyone that is not clearly on the extremes will be evaluated separately and if the grade assigned varies, it is taken to arbiters to reconcile. There can be a huge pile of 3.5 grade applications, from which they will accept 1000 students, but how they pick from out of the 10000 folders in the ‘pile’ is not at all like the other UC campuses that have given a score like 8623 to one student and 8419 to the next, then set the bar to admit EVERYONE below the line strictly by number.</p>
<p>I barely had an ECs but I got into every UC I applied to (Spring for Cal, but still…) I was ELC though.</p>
<p>not really, ECs can count for a lot, depending on the person. I didn’t have the gpa nor the SAT for Davis and still got in (3.5 and 1680). But I had stellar ECs including +1000 hours helping my community in various programs/event, varsity captain, clubs and other academic internships.</p>