<p>My friend told me that not a big chunk of admission decision is assigned to the essay/ activities section. He said is was 40% SAT/ACT 40% GPA and 20% essay. </p>
<p>Is this true?</p>
<p>no there is alot more that goes into it. but an essay, worth however many points, will get you noticed by an admissions officer if it is good, compelling, and especially if its about anything to do with overcoming adversity.</p>
<p>it depends on the campous. The essays are critical at Cal and UCLA. At SD, the essays themselves count for absolutely nothing – the readers skim them looking to award extra points for low income, overcoming adversity and the like, but the writing itself means little. Merced and Riverside are all numbers – M takes anyone with a B average who can still breathe. :)</p>
<p>btw: your friend is incorrect on teh test score weighting – gpa is worth more.</p>
<p>For Davis, UCSD, and possibly Irvine, there is a set point system that you can find quite easily by searching through this forum or the respective websites. That’ll tell you exactly how everything is weighted, it just won’t tell you what the cutoff point total will be, but you can get a good approximation based on previous years.</p>
<p>Essays are, as has been mentioned, just ways to pick up points at these campuses by either elaborating on vague ECs or volunteer work, or by describing some sort of socioeconomic or otherwise weighty personal struggle. They can also be a good place to explain away things like a lower SAT or a bad grade here or there if it ties in with the general story.</p>
<p>Berkeley and LA actually read the essays holistically (or so they say), so it is inferred though not technically proven that your essays make a big difference there.</p>
<p>There is certainly no clear cut 40-40-20% distribution though, so your friend is mistaken.</p>
<p>Best of luck,
cp</p>
<p>All UC campuses use Comprehensive Review, which requires each campus to consider 14 factors for application evaluation (<a href=“http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/general_info/uc_reviews/freshman_app.html[/url]”>http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/general_info/uc_reviews/freshman_app.html</a>). Each UC campus gets to decide HOW it weighs the 14 factors. Davis and San Diego use point systems that assigns actual weight to each factor. Berkeley and UCLA use holistic review which considers the student as a whole package. The rest of the UCs do something in between.</p>
<p>According to the Common Data Set (well buried on the website of each UC campus), which describes the evaluation criteria as very important, important, considered, or not considered, the application essay is rated as:</p>
<p>Berkeley - very important
Davis - important
Irvine - very important
UCLA - very important
Merced - very important
Riverside - blank
San Diego - very important
Santa Barbara - very important
Santa Cruz - very important</p>
<p>Other academic factors that are rated consistently as very important across the UC campuses include: 1) rigor of secondary school record, 2) academic GPA, 3) standardized test scores. There are a variety of nonacademic factors listed as well if you want to look up the Common Data Set for each UC campus (search “Common Data Set” on the website should lead you there).</p>
<p>I say hell yes.
Students are more than just a score. They should know about that too.</p>
<p>if you write an outstanding/attention-grabbing essay, trust me – people remember.</p>
<p>i applied for a scholarship at a UC my senior year. </p>
<p>let’s just say the first words out of my interviewer’s mouth – “hey, i remember you. i really loved your personal statement!” </p>
<p>helps if it’s funny as well. ; ) seriousness is overrated…</p>
<p>^^take a look-see at San Diego’s point totals – there are zero points for writing “outstanding/attention-grabbing essay, trust me,” Zero.</p>
<p>The admissions officer at UC Santa Barbara told a group of parents that they weight the essay as 50% of the consideration. It’s read by two people. The essay readers are staff, faculty and alumni.</p>
<p>She said that other UC’s weight differently. She said UCLA and Berkeley weight the essay at 30% with GPA and scores at 70%.</p>
<p>^^But don’t forget, those are just averages of the total pool (if true). UC loves applicants who have overcome adversity, so an adversity app might be 70+% essay at Cal and UCLA and perhaps <30% hard stats. OTOH, kids from suburban prep schools might be 90% hard stats.</p>
<p>Santa Barbara does figure half the points based on nonstats stuff, but that is not the essay as a work of art or impressive writing capability or even writing technical excellence. not true. They read the essay PLUS the other nonstats items in the application to create the rating for 50% of the admissions score. That is NOT just the essay, the officer was misunderstood or wasn’t clear in phrasing the statement. Here are the key sections of the UCSB selection process page:</p>
<p>FROM [UCSB</a> Admissions](<a href=“http://www.admissions.ucsb.edu/SelectionProcess.asp?section=selectionprocess&subsection=reviewprocess&selectiontype=prospective_freshman]UCSB”>http://www.admissions.ucsb.edu/SelectionProcess.asp?section=selectionprocess&subsection=reviewprocess&selectiontype=prospective_freshman)</p>
<p>Eligible applicants are then assessed for academic promise. The academic promise review seeks to identify an applicant’s achievements and personal qualities in the context of the opportunities and/or challenges an applicant has had which, when coupled with the academic review, provide a comprehensive view of an applicant’s potential for success at UCSB. Achievements and personal characteristics for which evidence is sought in the academic promise review are grouped into the following four categories:
Challenges, special circumstances, hardships and persistence
Leadership, initiative, service and motivation
Diversity of intellectual and social experience
Honors, awards, special projects, talents, creativity, and intellectual vitality</p>
<p>While there are no fixed points for activities or accomplishments, there are broad guidelines given to readers to suggest where point levels should lie. An applicant will receive one of the following ratings during the academic promise review:
Outstanding:
Applicant demonstrates outstanding characteristics or achievement in one or more of the four supplemental review areas. Applicant will offer a remarkable quality or level of achievement that will greatly enrich the freshman class.
Significant:
Applicant demonstrates strong or significant characteristics or achievement in one or more of the four supplemental criteria areas. Applicant will offer a quality or level of achievement that will significantly enhance the freshman class.
Good:
Applicant demonstrates average or good characteristics or achievement in one or more of the four supplemental criteria areas. Applicant will offer a quality or level of achievement that will enhance the freshman class.
Typical:
Applicant demonstrates some characteristics or achievement in one or more of the four supplemental review areas, but with limited range or depth. The applicant will not distinguish himself or herself relative to the other UCSB applicants and will not enrich the freshman class.</p>
<p>END OF UCSB content</p>
<p>The points are not assigned because the essay blows someone away. If you get points, it is because you had some outstanding achievement, which could be in the standard app lists and not in the essay at all. It could be extraordinary leadership, which again could be fully discovered from the main application and not the essay. The essay is read at UCSB, as it is at all the UCs outside of Cal and UCLA, simply to look for FACTS that warrant points in the admissions formula. If the essay mentions some achievement, for example that the applicant founded and lead a community organization that make some significant and newsworthy change that benefited their local area, even if that achievement is written in mangled English with illiterate grammar and garbled spelling, they will be given the top points and an admissions offer. Someone who has only typical achievements, life situation, etc but writes an essay that would bring tears to the eyes of the literature department, will get only the typical level of points and need to depend solely upon stats to earn an offer.</p>
<p>This is a good thing for diversity, not just in the narrow sense of class, ethnicity and geography, but allows that campus to pick really interesting and different people to add into the student population in a way that UCSD or UCSC cannot with their more constrained set of factors. </p>
<p>However, one can find extreme cases of admitted students at Cal and UCLA where stats could not be rigidly 70% of the overall evaluation method because that could not fit the very low GPAs and SATs that show up as exceptions. More likely, the campus targets a percentage of students who are selected by override based on these attractive factors, but ensures that a big enough majority fit the top end of the HS performance curve to maintain the overall educational caliber. Not that every student is evaluated based on 50% other factors and 50% stats, as at UCSB, or by some other fixed ratio, but that the admissions committee is allowed to fulfill a complex set of needs for the incoming student body in total but not formulaically applicant by applicant. Different ways to get to a diverse and interesting student body, both methods have merit.</p>
<p>i would call 20% a big chunk.</p>
<p>People say that the only reasons UCs require essays is to be more elite than CSUs. Is this true? I mean I laughed really hard when I heard this , but I guess it makes a little bit more sense.</p>
<p>The UCs are not using the personal statement to distinguish themselves from CSUs. The personal statement serves an important function of allowing the campuses to put a personality to a set of numbers (courses, grades, test scores) and giving the competitive campuses a way to cull the top students from a sea of extremely qualified students.</p>
<p>And talk about a sea of applicants … Here are the figures for some (freshman + transfers)</p>
<p>UCB 65,474
UCLA 76,313
UCSD 62,376
UCSB 58,992</p>
<p>To qualify for a Regents scholarship interview, a student would have to be at the top 3% of their applicant pool.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure that if you didn’t write an essay (if not all 3) at all you would ruin your chances of getting in. You’re even supposed to use the optional open question essay to the best of your advantage, it may be the thing that sets you apart.</p>
<p>there were 3 essay prompts?
really?
uh oh</p>
<p>No there were two, but I think he’s referring to the section where you could give additional information as the “third” prompt. I didn’t write another essay but I explained some stuff there</p>
<p>aw man.
I could have used that to tell them about my A.D.D.
O well.</p>
<p>You will never be rejected for not writing an essay (this came directly from UCLA and I’m pretty sure the UC campuses using point system evaluation will agree). But you will be severely handicapped in the application evaluation process if the essays are missing.</p>
<p>You should NEVER use the Additional Comments section for a third essay. That section is reserved for additional information you need to include that is relevant to your application but does not appear anywhere else on the application (for example, disclosing a medical condition or family problems not discussed in your essays).</p>