<p>I'm a California HS junior, and right now my grades really aren't up to par for UC Berkeley. Does anybody know how important the extracurriculars and essays are for the evaluation, and how much they can boost your status? By the way, I will have about a 3.55-3.62 weighted GPA by the end of junior year, and I'm taking a LOT of AP and Honors classes. SAT I: 2150... Can the Extracurriculars and essays help a guy like me at all?</p>
<p>Essays and ECs are very important, regardless of how much people will say Berkeley admissions are formulaic. I think I may have been in a position similar to yours. Actually, your SAT I is higher (but it's hard to compare because of our taking different tests). Hopefully you had an upward trend in your grades, and you write as good or better essays than you think.</p>
<p>Yeah, I've definetely had a huge upwards grade trend (I got a 3.87 last semester and hope to get somewhere around a 4.0 or higher this semester). Thanks for the info.</p>
<p>Take harder courses, get better grades, write killer essays, and do a few EC activities very well. You should be on track.</p>
<p>ive attended programs and seminars about the whole admissions process and it was conducted by an ex-admissions officers at harvard and mit. even though they're professional consultants now, they are still very much updated in the whole field. they told me that an application can be divided into almost four parts: the test scores/grades, ECs, essays, and teacher/guidance recs. so they're claiming that essays and ECs make up half of your entire application. i dont know if that's true, but it must be fairly accurate. so yea, they're very important. and i think it's been proven that it's not all about your gpa and sat scores.</p>