<p>My friend, who is a junior in high school, claims that he has a "better than 50% chance" of getting into UC Berkeley by applying directly to the College of Natural Resources for a major in Environmental Science. He claims that their admissions criteria is significantly less demanding than that of say the College Of Letters and Sciences. He currently has an apx. 3.5 weighted GPA and is yet to take the SATs (its not like he's going get a perfect score or anything). This has led to impassioned arguments between the two of us, where I claim as a senior well aquainted with the UC admissions process that if getting into Berkeley was made so easy by applying in such a fashion than numerous other applicants would also have taken advantage of this wonderful opportunity...
Maybe he's a genius and I'm bitter that I didn't take advantage of this golden opportunity before I submitted my UC Apps.
Or maybe he's an idiot (like I suspect he is) and is living in a dream world.
Either way, an answer will be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>A lot of people do this for similar colleges such as Cornell and its hotel school. Unfortunately, once you do get in many of these schools make it hard for you to transfer out.</p>
<p>My guidance counselor told me that last year (two years for you guys) applied to the nursing program at UVA so he wouldn't be rejected. He got in but after that his GPA suffered a blow and the college did not allow him to change his majors ( I think he was actually on academic probation).</p>
<p>The same occured to kids who applied to certain majors like Anthropology at Ivies or other obscure majors when they actually wanted, say, Wharton. Unfortunately they did not know how hard it was to transfer to Wharton from other Penn colleges and had to stick with it.</p>
<p>Imagine how hard it must be to THROW away 200,000k and 4 years of the best time of your life for a major that was not what you wanted.</p>
<p>If kids want to use loopholes like Barnard, Nursing school, Hotel school, Forestry, Agricultural, etc; let them. They are usually not successful even if the loophole works (lower GPA) and currently many colleges have caught on to this (such as Cornell/NYU/Penn) by making transfers between colleges very hard. </p>
<p>Note: I do not know if Berkeley has such a loophole but if they do, they are aware of it. No top school is unaware of almost ANYTHING applicants do to boost their chances of admittance. Even I'VE seen everything just filing folders (and I've been workin for like a month).</p>