Admitted to UC Berkeley (out of state) this year and would be glad to share parts of my experience with the application process as well offer my opinions on building your app. College Confidential helped me immensely last year so I’m trying to give back lol.
Looking at the admission statistics, Berkeley’s ACT and GPA score do not seem as high as I expected. So am I right to assume that they care a lot about ECs and the Personal Insight Questions?
UCB and other UCs tend to be less test-score-sensitive than GPA-sensitive.
According to http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/freshman-admissions-summary , for 2015, frosh applicants to UCB with GPA >= 4.20 had an admit rate of 46%, while those with GPA from 3.80-4.19 had an admit rate of 12%. These are UC-weighted-capped GPAs, so they tend to correspond to unweighted 10th-11th grade a-g course GPAs that are 0.3-0.4 lower.
Admissions is also by division (and major within engineering). So if you apply to a popular division (or popular engineering major), you should expect admission to be more difficult than overall stats indicate.
Yeah, I did expect it to be a lot harder for subjects like computer science. I’m planning on applying for materials science which I believe should not be as hard as the others. Also, I looked at the application where you have to enter your grades and I’m curious as to how they calculate GPA. I saw that they only looked at As and Bs and not A-s or B+s, so I’m guessing a 90 is an A and an 89 is a B. So would they just calculate an unweighted GPA using only the base letter without pluses or minuses?
http://www.csumentor.edu/planning/high_school/gpa_calculator.asp describes the GPA calculation used by UCs and CSUs. For a-g categories and honors designations of high school courses, see https://hs-articulation.ucop.edu/agcourselist .
Engineering is super competitive to get in to. Specially EECS admit rate is in lower single digits.
Do universities have preferences for ACT sections because I got about the same scores in English, Math, and Science but quite a lot lower in Reading?