<p>“UCLA is a great school. Wisconsin-Madison, Maryland are just OK. (I hope you kid selected UCLA.)”</p>
<p>I would choose both Wisconsin and Maryland over UCLA. I think they both produce more professors at top schools. I would only choose UCLA if i were doing AI or graphics. Wisconsin has what many consider to be the best computer architecture group in the world as well as a famous database group.</p>
<p>Anyway, I don’t know why you mention Cal Tech or even Princeton as ‘the best of the best’… sure they have low acceptance rates, but they don’t have the awesome abundance of research and large scope you’d find at, for instance, Texas. Lay prestige means diddly-squat when you’re looking for a full-time research position.</p>
<p>I don’t know why you would pick the best school for my daughter when you don’t know what area she studies. I’m pretty sure she picked for herself well.</p>
<p>For others–she picked based on-- the prof she wanted most to work with and research with; the department she felt had most depth; the department who was most collaborative within the CS and the Math Dept. the dept who was most collab with others.</p>
<p>Wisconsin has an excellent, influential CS department, and Maryland isn’t too shabby, either. As others have said, much depends on the specific area of CS. However, if you were to rate CS generally (that is, the breadth and depth of the research and not specific areas of strength), I would bet that UCLA would rank below both of them.</p>
<p>But that’s not the OP’s question. When applying to CS programs, the general rule for GRE scores is over 500 V and as close to 800 as possible for Q. AW is rarely considered. Master’s programs have lower standards than do PhD programs, mostly because the level of ambition is different and because the student usually ends up paying most, if not all, of his way. My gut feeling is that your verbal score is good enough for the CS programs residing in more technical schools but not for the universities that value broad undergraduate education (the Ivies, Stanford, etc.) because sometimes the graduate school, and not the individual programs, set minimums. </p>
<p>I suggest that you take a look at the engineering results for 2010 (a search should bring it up) to see the stats and acceptances of last year’s applicants.</p>
<p>I know that PhD programs require a lot of of formal research experiences. I do have research experiences but they are hardly to be “formal”. That’s why I’m applying to MS first.</p>