Based upon this years’ acceptances can anyone make an educated guess on MCA thresholds needed to gain admission this year to the School of Engineering (realizing there are variations by specific majors).
Ranging from 4200 to 4700 I would estimate. ME, AERO, BMED, and CS would be on the higher end
I think it would be safe to say those four are solidly at the top of that range.
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Answering my own OP I researched the acceptance threads. Many who posted did not include MCA score, just GPA’s and standardized test scores, so hard to make an educated calculation but @eyemgh is right, 4700 seems to be bare minimum, with most at 4800++ in CS & ME.
Your best bet is look at fact book for 2016. You’ll see stats by school and acceptances by major. If I were you, I wouldnt waste allot of time fine tuning a MCA estimate. Much of what is assumed about MCA calculation is conjecture based upon info from 5 years ago that is no longer published. The big 3 drivers are 1. GPA , 2. ACT score, 3. High School (service area / OOS). Also, you should expect admissions to be even more competive this year, due to last years fiasco. Best of luck.
It is correct in that they haven’t published anything new since 2013. Most posters here have acknowledged that. Since it was the last thing published and no one knows if it’s still valid or has been replaced, we run with the last known information. At the VERY best, it’s a guess. As for #3 above service area only means anything if you’re from SLO county or northern Santa Barbara County, assuming the algorithm hasn’t changed. I haven’t seen any evidence that it has. Otherwise, all CA residents are treated the same. It’s also true that OOS and in state residents are evaluated in separate pools. There’s been conjecture that the OOS pool is less competitive, but again, no one has ever presented any proof of that speculation.
Son applied with 4746 MCA for CS with SE as alternate. I don’t expect it to be enough but it was worth a shot!
Does SLO still favor the ACT?
@sbjdorlo, they say they prefer the ACT, but the MCA, assuming it’s still the same since it was last seen publicly in 2013, freely converts between the two with no preference to either.
That’s what I’d heard, but of course we all know stories of kids with lower MCAs that get in over kids with higher MCAs in the same major, so I wonder if those kids get bumps because they took the ACT. I guess I could call admissions. 
@sbjdorlo, I have seen kids with higher GPAs and test scores and kids who forgot to include middle school grades rejected for “lesser” students. IF an MCA was accurately calculated though, I’ve yet to encounter the scenario you are posing. I’ve never seen a kid with a higher MCA getting rejected over a kid with a lower MCA, ever. I thought I did once when a student with a 4400 got into ME. I messaged his mom. Several months later, the mom found out the HS was a partner school, so his MCA was 5000.
This year Cal Poly is forgiving students who forgot to put their middle school grades on their application. They won’t be a factor in the MCA. This was confirmed by myself as well as another user on this forum.
Re: #11
How often are middle school grades relevant? They are not included in GPA, and the most common high school level middle school courses are in math or foreign language, whose absence from high school records would be validated by higher level courses taken while in high school.
They are relevant in the MCA process. Unfortunately, the MCA system doesn’t validate higher level math courses as justification for the middle school records being absent. Those who failed to list their middle school Algebra 1 and Geometry grades would have missed out on 250 MCA points (obviously this is no longer the case since Cal Poly decided to forgive those who forgot to list their middle school grades after seeing too many applicants do so).
@venm1337, I was only referencing cases where students THOUGHT they had a better MCA than they really did in years past. It was in context to @sbjdorlo suggesting lower MCA applicants had been accepted over those with higher MCAs. I personally can’t say I’ve encountered that EXCEPT when student miscalculated their MCA.
@ucbalumnus, as odd as it may sound, CP does ask for middle school grades of they are for high school level math or foreign language. You’d think they could simply go by the highest level of math, but they don’t. This year the CSU application was redesigned, but didn’t allow a space for Cal Poly’s quirk. It must have screwed up so many students this year that they simply are ignoring those classes.
Agree that the redesigned CSU app really made filling out SLO’s info difficult. I had several students who had to spend literally a few hours on the phone with SLO to get the correct information on how to fill it out. I am not a fan of how SLO does admissions, to be sure, but it is what it is.
@venm1337 Our son called SLO, too, and the admissions counselor confirmed that not including high school math taken in middle school would not be counted against students this year. What he didn’t ask was how this will be done. With over 65,000 applicants there is no way to check each application. Will they just give everyone the extra 250 MCA points?!
Here’s my hypothesis. We know that in the process of calculating MCA, the class rigor score is capped at a maximum of 750 points, thanks to this post: (http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17668346/#Comment_17668346)
Assuming that an applicant took 8 semesters of math in high school (which pretty much all of us do), that would leave middle school math coursework to only count for 250 MCA points, since the math section caps out at 10 semesters/500 bonus points, with 125 bonus points per semester taken after the 6th math semester (see the link I posted if this confuses you).
Because of this, it is clear that applicants who forget to declare their middle school grades are missing out on exactly 250 MCA points.
As a result, I believe the most probable way that Cal Poly is going to be correcting this problem and making sure that this error is not counted against applicants is simply by slightly tweaking the MCA algorithm altogether.
Instead of including a maximum of 750 points for the rigor section, I believe Cal Poly will instead be reducing the cap to 500 points to account for the error that many students made in not listing their middle school math grades.
This way, those who DID list their middle school grades will simply have their MCA’s brought down by 250 points, and those who forgot to list middle school math grades will be on a more even playing field since their 250 MCA point deficiency will now be eliminated.
I think this is the most likely course of action that Cal Poly will take because it doesn’t involve them having to edit each and every single application. This is the most convenient way of fixing this whole ordeal and applications will still be able to be seamlessly fed through the algorithm to make admissions decisions quickly like in years past.
I hope this makes sense, and even more so I hope what I’m saying is actually true. Although I’m very confident in my theory, I’m just another one of the thousands of applicants in the sea, so until someone at CP admissions tells us exactly how they’re going to be compensating for this flaw, we can’t be 100% sure. At least there’s only ~1 month and a half left until we know our fate lol.
Hope this helps, and good luck!
If you look at the requirements (https://admissions.calpoly.edu/applicants/freshman/criteria.html), the bonus MCA points are for the desired advanced math, with Algebra and Geometry being required. It seems easiest to just forgive missing geometry and algebra if you have pre-calc and calculus on your transcript. That way they can still give 500 to those who made it through calculus, and 250 to those who only made it as far as pre-calc.
@MelloG, two years of algebra are required (I and II). An applicant only gets full MCA points if they are in at least calculus. Pre-Calc will only net 250. I do agree that they should simply infer the previous math courses by whatever your highest math is.