One course in the application, being considered UC Hons or not can be the difference between getting admitted or not.
What’s your source on this? Do you have information that there is some sort of cut off or required number? I’ve heard the opposite in the UC admissions presentations.
Yes, I also understood there is no cut-off or auto admit by GPA. That is the whole point of holistic review.
My understanding is that someone with a 4.24 is not always going to be admitted over someone with a 4.11, for example. The review takes into account the student’s school, courses, community, extracurricular activities, etc., for a reason.
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So true. Valedictorian from our daughter’s school did not make it to UCB last year. She had a 4.8 Weighted GPA with 18 UC Approved H/AP/CL courses. No one really knows the magic formula here…
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It is also course relevancy. In my school, the GPA game is played with AP courses that has no bearing on one’s major in college.
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Just making a point that GPA can differ by a few decimal points with just one course being considered UC honors or not.
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@raj_125 Agree…My D22 has two 10th grade Honors classes that won’t count at all (a 0.166 drag), and she is in a Private Catholic HS that requires religion/philosophy courses as well (a 0.2ish drag)…
The class to fulfill a religious studies requirement affects everybody in the same way in her local context…and it presumably it helps a “little” with the rigor assessment (there were options on what could fulfill the requirement and she deliberately took the options that were a bit more academic)…
But yeah…with only 10-11 grades being considered in the GPAs, the denominator is pretty small, so any changes in the numerator are relatively pretty noisy…and given the relative admissions “odds” I pulled out of InfoCenter stats, it just takes a lot of trust in the holistic review process - we have to trust that the AO’s understand that a 0.3 WGPA swing can be as simple as having one extra required course and taking some Honors classes that didn’t “count” at your school, but do at others (presumably for a good reason).
My S22s UC GPA dropped by 0.12 because his school district made Pass/Fail mandatory for a semester and that canceled honors points from his two AP classes where he had hard earned As. I’m praying the UCs are not fooling us with this holistic review crap but as others have pointed out the GPA is a major factor and it’s sad to think arbitrary school district decisions can have these gpa effects.
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I have no working knowledge of the admissions process, other than what is listed by UCB for admissions criteria. My take (for what it’s worth, and not much, probably) is that your daughter is going to be in a boat with other kids who are in some kind of high top-tier bucket. At that point, I would bet, the important factors become their insight questions and other attributes. I say this because at that level, I would really hope that UCB would use criteria like the personal insight answers, as opposed to a 0.03 GPA difference to make admissions decisions. I also say this because my son is a 2nd year at UCB, and his UW GPA was a 3.80 and his UCGPA was 4.0. His ECs and essay answers were strong and had to have played a big role in his admission. UCB claims to use a holistic admissions process and I totally believe that.
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To be clear - my posts were never meant to imply that there is a formula or a GPA cutoff…nothing of the sort.
That said, admissions rates do correlate with GPAs…My intent was simply to compare the odds of a random applicant getting admitted with those of a random CA applicant being admitted with those of a High GPA CA applicant being admitted, etc…
What I found was that a large portion of the admits have very high GPAs, and a lot of the High GPA applicants still don’t get in…There clearly isn’t a pure-GPA driven cutoff, though it seems self-evident that lower GPAs have much lower odds of success and lower GPA admits must be making up for the difference in other parts of the holistic review. In a similar vein, in the interest of “chancing” my kid, I wanted to know how predictive the GPAs were of admissions success…and the correlation seems material enough to say the odds of admission for a group in a given range of UC C&W GPAs can be identified and meaningful across an entire pool of applicants…though not dispositive for any given candidate.
For example…here’s another nugget I gleaned from InfoCenter:
All UCB applicants from CA taken together as a pool seem to have a ~20% UCB acceptance rate
That acceptance rate isn’t uniform, though. There are a large number of apps >4.2 in W&C GPA.
Those from CA with over 4.2 W&C have an acceptance rate more on the order of 30% as a pool.
Those from CA with under a 4.2 W&C have an acceptance rate on the order of 10%…it definitely still happens, just not nearly as often…and the bar for other factors in the holistic review presumably gets more and more important with lower GPA levels…
For example, though I didn’t explore it deeply, for the 3.8-4.19 UC C&W UCB pool, admissions “odds” drop to about 16%…a little over half of the odds above 4.2…and for the under 3.8 group, the odds fall off dramatically to <2%. The steepness of that curve, and the implied correlation with GPA, is what made me very curious about how they actually calculate the WGPA. Clearly, factors other than GPA weigh in as well…but GPA is a very predictive measure (as these things go)
I would also add that those historical admit rates also included SAT in the mix. With no SAT, some lower GPA kids with high SAT scores would now be worse off. I would assign even greater predictive power for the GPA this cycle.
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Below are the 2020 UC capped weighted admit GPA ranges for each campus which used SAT/ACT test scores in their application review followed by 2021 UC capped weighted admit GPA ranges with test blind admissions.
2020 UC capped weighted GPA with 25th-75th percentile range: **
UCB: 4.13-4.30
UCLA: 4.18-4.31
UCSD: 4.04-4.28
UCSB: 4.03-4.27
UCI: 3.96-4.26
UCD: 3.97-4.25
UCSC: 3.71-4.16
UCR: 3.65-4.11
UCM: 3.40-3.96
2021 UC capped weighted GPA with 25th-75th percentile range:
UCB: 4.12-4.30
UCLA: 4.19-4.32
UCSD: 4.07-4.29
UCSB: 4.10-4.29
UCI: 3.96-4.26
UCD: 3.95-4.25
UCSC: 3.81-4.20
UCR: 3.70-4.13
UCM: 3.39-4.00
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Thank you. Is there a calculator for this? I used two different ones online, one said mine comes to 4.33 and another said 4.51.
I use the Rogerhub UC calculator: GPA Calculator for the University of California – RogerHub
The capped weighted maximum is 4.4
The fully weighted maximum is 5.0
Thank you for posting this! UCSC seems to have changed the most but these ranges are so similar post SAT/ACT.
Remember to count community college classes as one semester/one grade for UC.
Mine are all AP. Also OOS. And straight As.
Thank you
Looks like the capped maximum of 4.4 can only be achieved by taking just 5 courses a semester. My load is 7 per semester with a total of 7 AP courses between grades 10 and 11. So, my capped maximum came to 4.29 and weighted to 5.
Your situation just highlights why the UC’s consider all 3 UC GPA’s.
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