Regents candidates are in the top 2% of applicants. One would assume that the top 2% have very high GPAs and that the rest of their application is also strong.
You can go back through old threads and look for stats of those that were offered to interview for Regents.
The Regent scholarship website makes no mention of stats or GPA. Instead they say
“…undergraduates who stand out for their creativity, leadership, service, and strong convictions.”
“Candidates reflect one of the highest principles of this institution: commitment to excellence”
You could technically interpret excellence as High stats but that’s only as important to the extent high stats are generally needed to be competitive at Cal.
Yep – I hope that whenever those invites go out, people will keep all of this in perspective. It’s the tippy-top candidates even being invited to interview for Regents. From among a giant pool of applicants to a school that has close to a single-digit acceptance rate. Few if any of the people in this thread will get (or have a child who gets) this invitation.
I know one student who was offered UCB Regent’s in 2016. He ended up choosing UCSB’s CCS program. He did have a very high GPA and a 1550+ or something SAT (still considered by UC at the time) and lots of DE, especially math. He finished AP Calculus his freshman or soph year of high school. . .he’s now a PhD student at Cal Tech in math (some kind of math–Applied Math?).
I also know a student who turned down UCB Regents for CCS at UCSB.
I know this isn’t the right thread to elaborate, but I think if I were given that option, I might do the same. UCSB’s CCS program looks amazing! 
I saw these two people on two different threads who had decent gpas, but nothing extraordinary and they got it. They said it’s cause they wrote very unique essays. If it was just gpa based almost everyone would get it, as most people have competitive gpas.
One of my children interviewed for Regents at Berkeley. Based on her experience talking to the other kids at the interview, everyone was very accomplished.
Again, these are what Berkeley considers to be the top 2% of their applicants. An average Berkeley applicant is a top student with an impressive resume. Regents candidates are top 2% of those already awe-inspiring students.
Yeah, I’ve heard a similar story from a few applicants from last year. One said that she didn’t have a super high GPA but her extracurriculars probably stood out to the readers. She then got in with regents for CS.
3 posts were split to a new thread: UC Berkeley Portal Astrology Discussion 2023
Per recent Reddit post re next year L&S CS admits-only 100 students ? Thoughts?
Under the new L&S high demand major policy, the Fall 2023 incoming class will graduate in 2027 with perhaps:
• 100 CS-intended first-year admits (no GPA cap)
•70 other first-year admits (reviewed in their 2nd year)
35 CS-intended transfer admits (no GPA cap)
• 205 total CS degrees/year (down from 882 in 2022-23)
Crazy!
I hope people take the time to review all of the data and reasons outlined by Prof.DeNero in this video. It’s been clear for a while now that the old way of managing CS enrollment was untenable, and this video makes it crystal clear. And one can see DS would have ended up in much the same predicament without the change to direct admit.
The other thing that’s obvious is that they were clearly admitting by major for L&S CS.
It seems like cs became a lot more competitive after this rule.
If you watch the whole video, it is not primarily about CS admissions becoming competitive. The bulk of the video is about the reasons for the rapidly increasing cost of teaching CS courses at UCB, vs. the limited budget that the department has for teaching these courses. This affects everyone taking CS courses, not only CS and EECS (and Data Science, etc) majors. I recommend watching the whole video. It is interesting and useful to understand the problems they are facing.
Demand kept growing while supply couldn’t keep up (flat funding + increased labor costs), which meant the “price” had to go up. Unfortunately, the prior version of LS CS meant GSIs, Students, Professors were all paying that heavy price which worsened the experience for everyone involved. With the expiry of the side letter, even that structure became impossible to maintain.
CS hasn’t become more competitive, if anything the competition was kept artificially low all these years. No coincidence that the year this policy finally changed is also after the 1st year when CS admit rates fell below EECS rates.
@janians @storage_drive
I have moved the portal astrology posts into a new discussion thread since the portal astrology posts have dominated the Regular discussion thread in recent years
Wow well, it seems like getting into CS now is going to become ultra-competitive with all these changes.
Wow I am absolutely screwed for applying OOS to L&S CS…
You are probably in a better position that last year’s applicant class. They had the same # of seats but had a much larger applicant volume because direct admit wasn’t there and a ton of people applied LS CS rather than apply to EECS. Now, a good chunk of those folks may have applied to DS vs. CS just to be safe. So, I would expect the admit rates to be higher. You just have more info than last year’s class who were subjected to a VERY dramatic policy change in terms of reduced seats, and they didn’t even know it.