Would submitting letters increase the chances of admission? Since not every applicant gets the opportunity to submit letters, could the applicants who do attach LORs get a boost in admission chances?
This quote is from the BOARS report dated May 2022:
In the fall 2021 cycle, Berkeley gave 16,783 applicants, or 12.42% of the pool, the opportunity to submit a letter of recommendations. Of those applicants, 4,937 submitted, and 2,854 (58%) were admitted.
So yes, submitting LOR’s can help.
We hope that submitting good LORs might help our individual students to be part of the 58% that is admitted (or whatever the percentage will be this year). However, it’s possible that the LORs don’t give the group as a whole an advantage (or not nearly as much of an advantage as you might think, looking that 58% number). Perhaps this group of students has characteristics such that we could have expected about half of them to have been admitted anyway, and the LORs mostly help UCB to sort out which ones.
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I think LORs are asked for applicants who are likely on the margins of admit/denial. And a LOR can be helpful for that group where a small amount of incremental information can decide between a likely admit or denial. Not surprised that there is a near 50-50 split in this group.
would that not imply that admission is less holistic? They probably not had time to look at PIQs and other aspects of the application given the huge volume they get.
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was about to say. if perhaps a school’s name triggered the LOR request and if ucscuuw’s theory is true, that would be pretty weird, so I don’t think that’s the case… could be wrong, after all, who knows
Berkeley’s Cal Day open house for admitted students will be on Saturday, April 22, 2023.
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They also serve killer coffee at the event 
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Not necessarily - I would argue they are asking the LOR to make it even more holistic considering the totality of the circumstances that may not have been adequately reflected in the initial submission. Considering the really high app volume, Cal is not going to ask for supplemental info unless they feel something is sketchy about the app, or there is something about the applicant that is interesting enough to warrant additional info. In either case, if the reader scores are too low, I don’t really think they will ask for more info. Again, I am not a Cal expert by any means but reasonable to think an LOR indicates that incremental info is likely to be decisive for that applicant.
Some UCB Updates from the Counselor Conference.
High demand majors and alternate majors.
FPF program is now renamed Fall Program for First semester
UCB Waitlist Fall 2022 preliminary data. The waitlist was a cause for much angst last year and CC saw very few posts regarding admitted waitlisted students. I will starting a new discussion thread in February 2023 specifically for Waitlisted students.
Waitlist opt in: 4650
Waitlist admits: 48
Appeals submitted: 1240
Appeals granted: 4
Wow, those are crazy waitlist numbers.
I have a freshman at Cal, currently FPF. I’ll post impressions of the program later in the spring after finals.
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Waitlist admission numbers will be highly dependent on yield (both to the campus and to the division/major applied to).
Does Berkeley use a computer algorithm to scan all applications that they receive? Because I received my LOR request around 1 or 2 days later so I would assume there is no actual person triggering these requests. Also, for the applicants who do receive LOR requests, do they still get admitted if they have lower than average GPAs?
I don’t think anyone here knows what the process is for triggering the requests. It’s possible that it is triggered automatically by specific data in the app, and it’s also possible that they have people quickly looking over certain groups of apps. The process may also change from year to year.
As far as the GPA of people getting admitted, average GPA isn’t a cutoff. Some people with lower GPA than the average are admitted (it is an average, after all). High GPA also doesn’t assure admission (especially to UCB which seems to have relatively holistic admissions).
Here is a link showing the GPA admit ranges for UCB over the last 3 admission cycles:
https://pages.github.berkeley.edu/OPA/our-berkeley/ug-admissions.html
Select Academic Indicators from the top tabs.
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@Gumbymom Thanks for all you do as the moderator for the UC forums. Quick question, on that link with the GPA ranges for the past 3 admissions cycles, is that the UC GPA or some other GPA calc? Thanks.
Fully weighted UC GPA is the GPA listed on the graph.
Thanks for the data. Seems like above a GPA of 4.6, there is > 30% acceptance rate.
Hi 
I’m a parent of a UCB 2026 admitted student (he accepted). He received a request for LORs and submitted them. During that time, I came across this extremely informative video of the LOR (and admissions) process, a presentation of research findings by Berkeley faculty hosted by the Berkeley Institute of Data Science. One interesting bit of information I found promising was that there are two readers of the application. The first round is when applicant is marked as “likely possible” and a small percentage of those are invited to submit LOR. Only the second reader reads the LOR, so in my mind I felt my son made it through the first hurdle, his application will be seen by the second reader and will have an added advantage of a LOR (assuming it’s a positive letter!) that can influence the reader in a positive direction.
(edited to add: pls note the study was conducted during the 2016-17 admission cycle and sorry didn’t know the video would display so largely here! 
)
Here’s the link to the YouTube video:
Letters of recommendation in Berkeley undergraduate admissions
Source:
Letters of recommendation in Berkeley undergraduate admissions: Program evaluation and natural language processing
Berkeley Distinguished Lectures in Data Science
https://bids.berkeley.edu/events/letters-of-recommendation-in-Berkeley-undergraduate-admissions
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On the Academic Indicators tab what does SIRed mean? Also, what I understand is the largest percentage admitted is the group of students between 4.40 to 4.59 GPA, am I right?
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