Washington State
not in california; but reading through this trying to understand.
let’s say you have a kid who has a high ACT, all As; ranked #1 but at a small school that only offers two honors classes (english), 4 AP classes (calc, spanish, english and CS), and a handful of dual enrolled classes. The weighted GPA can’t be much more than 4.4 i believe.
would this kid be looked at holistically on doing great with what they have? or would it be a detriment to this kid with lack of AP/Dual classes; and if so, how is that holistic?
** and truly - dont want sound snide in any way. just trying to understand basically holistic admissions in general. love the school our kid attends, but sometimes think its going to go against the kid with lack of higher level classes. 
Thanks. Would have guessed that based on this list on the other site. After CA, WA and OR had the lions share of the list. Seems like disproportionately a West Coast thing (and I say that having grown up in CA and gone to a UC on the quarter system). But once I moved East it was all about semesters.
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ACT not considered (UC Policy)
Here is how UCLA claims to evaluate all applicants, and its seems that they will put that student’s record in light of the opportunities available: https://admission.ucla.edu/apply/freshman/freshman-requirements/application-review-process
To be clear, technically they could look holistically and your example would just end up being someone in the bottom 25% quartile of their OOS stats.
They wouldn’t look at the ACT score at all now – they aren’t just test optional, they are “test blind” and delete that info from the profile before the AO’s review it (allegedly). As OOS, the two honors course would not count in their weighted GPA (they would for a CA resident only), so only the 4 AP’s and handful of DE’s would count.
The weighted GPA is relative to how many courses a student takes that are counted in the unweighted GPA. So while the UC won’t give weighted credit to anything but AP/IB/DE for OOS, they DO still count any course that is the equivalent of their in-state honors course for in the GPA. So gym wouldn’t count, but many performing arts, computers, etc. and other electives would. They would both be reflected in your unweighted GPA and count toward your weighted GPA (but without the weighted credit).
So student A takes 4 AP’s one year and only 1 other course that the UC counts toward total GPA and they will end up with a much higher weighted GPA than Student B who takes the exact same 4 AP’s, gets the exact same grades but also takes 3 other courses that count in the total GPA. In this case the stats suggest the UC favors more Student A’s even though Student B’s accomplished the same on weighted courses but also took a lot of other course that reduced their weighted GPA even if they got all straight A’s. In other words, they tend to statistically favor kids who narrowly focus on AP/DE and didn’t also do a lot of band, drama, programming or other non-AP/DE honors courses at their schools.
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UC’s review applicants in the context of what is offered at their HS since there is so much variation in the types of courses available. OOS applicants are evaluated within a different application pool vs in-state. Also all the UC’s have capped enrollment for OOS and International students so the competition for admission is even greater.
I am not sure any kid at our school carefully (or otherwise) strategizes course selection for the UCs – of course we are an east coast school. Not only that, no kid in our school does 18 APs. The usual high number is between 12 and 15. There are a lot of post-AP courses of course that some of the stronger kids take. And kids applying to UCLA and UCB are not the absolute top kids in the class. They are usually 80th-90th percentile. So arguable they take even fewer than the high number I mentioned. Even though they take fewer APs than the speculated 18, and perhaps in the 10-12 area, we manage about 2 matriculants each to UCB and UCLA out of a 140 class. I suspect the numbers are so small because they are perceived to be a) far away, b) crowded, and c) expensive.
We don’t have any personal experience with UCB.
The weighted-capped recalculation is supposed to limit the effect of merely having more honors (AP, IB) courses available to take. UC admission readers see all three recalculated GPAs as well as the courses and grades listed in the application. They are supposed to consider the applicant’s achievement in the context of what is available to the applicant (cannot reasonably expect more honors (AP, IB) courses than there are available, for example).
Of course, no system is perfect, and any system can be gamed, particularly if there is more transparency in it.
Yes, the lack of need-based financial aid for out-of-state students and the relative rarity of merit scholarships and merit+need scholarships means that out-of-state undergraduates are likely to be from high SES families who can afford the out-of-state list price – lower SES students who apply and are admitted generally do not attend because they cannot afford it.
Not too common, and more common in the west (e.g. Washington and Oregon). But note that quarter system colleges are uncommon among California community colleges (3 out of about 112) that are the most common dual enrollment colleges in California. CSUs are also mostly on the semester system. It is only the UC system that is predominantly on the quarter system, but note that UCM started up on the semester system.
Agreed. What the stats suggest is regardless of student calculation, UCLA/UCB biases toward those who ended up taking mostly AP/DE and few non AP/DE courses. They may have a holistic application process that looks at the school profile and other individual student factors, but at the end of the day 75% of their OOS admits took at least 12 AP/DE’s (and 25% took more than 18) and had a weighted GPA which would have required relatively few non-AP/DE courses that count in the total GPA.
Assuming there’s no caveat in their reported data that isn’t clear from the available information, that means for every admit they took from a school with fewer AP/DE opportunities or recruited athlete (who wasn’t also in in the cohort of tons of AP/DE courses) or student who was exceptional for reasons other than their AP/DE ratio, they took 3 who had a very high number of AP/DE’s and a high ratio of such classes to total classes. Which suggest that their holistic process for OOS strongly biases toward students and schools that prioritized AP/DE’s.
But UCLA and UCB consider uncapped (pretty sure you’re the one who noted that previously) This mostly negates the value of the capped for those schools and their data suggests they mostly pick students from the schools where they did have outsized AP/DE opportunities. So if they are considering kids from those other schools they are selecting them in a small minority of cases.
This is probably more the result of only out-of-state students from high SES families being able to afford to matriculate. Regardless of how many or how few out-of-state students from low SES families are admitted, those students are unlikely to matriculate because they cannot afford it. In addition, students from low SES families are less likely to apply out-of-state to begin with.
Since high SES tends to correlate to access to schools with more honors (AP, IB, college dual enrollment) offerings, it should not be a surprise that the out-of-state students come loaded with more of those courses in high school.
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Presumably true, though all the stats I quoted were from the Admit data not the Enrolled data.
Well the in-state honor count of 26 and WGPA of 4.63 is still high. Not as high as OOS. It is all confusing when they consider both capped and uncapped GPA. it is easier to maximize one at the expense of the other.
Our nationally ranked, public, 1,000/class HS places many students at the UCs each year (and some of the more popular CSUs, like CSPLO (10 last year) and SDSU).
At our HS it would be very uncommon for even the top students to take more than 8 APs (generally don’t start APs until junior year), yet the top students would have taken all/substantially all core courses over the four years at the ‘high honors’ level, which is the same level as APs (DE is not a thing here).
For example, last year at UCLA (8 students matriculating), 2 students had zero APs (I know they are both recruited athletes), 1 had 2 APs, and 5 had 4+ (likely an average of around 6). Interestingly, 2 are transferring out.
Clearly the AOs are sorting through the OOS vagaries by high school because our HS does not prioritize APs/DEs (perhaps the UCs are counting ‘high honors’ classes as APs from a school like ours?), yet I agree with you that means the in-state students have even higher GPAs and more AP/DEs than what the averages are showing.
Similar to the situation at my kids’ high ranked public HS. They regiment AP matriculation by subject so for the vast majority of students its impossible to take any Freshman year and most (of the subset on the top tract) take only one Sophomore year (APUS) and it’s not until Junior year that most can take AP’s in English, Math and Science. Without counting our equivalent to honors, it would be impossible to get to the typical uncapped weighted GPA of the OOS students. And even counting our equivalent to high honors, it would be impossible to get to the 75% quartile uncapped weighted GPA – some schools seem to weight categories of classes that our doesn’t. And yet our school sends 50+ kids to the ivy league on a typical year and offers classes in math and science above the top AP subjects. According to Naviance in the last two years we had 20 admit to UCLA and 13 to USB despite that.
And yet the stats suggest that for the most part they are not. For every example like our schools, they must be taking at least 3 from schools that must have an exceptional # of AP/DE’s. Unless the stats are wrong or misleading.
I’ve wondered that too, because it would make so much more sense in relation to these statistics. I was hoping one of the many well informed posters here would shed light on that. But according to the UC’s published information, they expressly are not counting any of the honors, high honors, G&T, accel or what have you top academic classes from OOS school other than AP/IB/DE.
I found it interesting they were quoting 12th grade courses for the “honors” count despite not doing so for admission. But I’ve seen no note or caveat that they are also counting non-AP/IB/DE courses despite not doing so for their admission process. Also, how would they even determine this – if they don’t go to the trouble to identify those courses as weighted in the admission process, how could they suddenly count them just for a class profile report? Seems odd.
I find the IS stats more expected than the OOS stats. It seems highly counter intuitive that IS admit with a much broader set of classes that are eligible to be counted as “honors” and factored into their weighted GPA’s, yet have materially fewer such classes and lower weighted GPA’s than OOS. (Yes, I get that OOS is a self-selecting subset that can afford the high tuition.)
One of two things thinks is likely true (unless someone has another theory or additional info to add clarity):
- The UC’s truly are highly favoring the very small subset of schools nationally that offer a vast number of AP’s or DE opportunities and the students who narrowly focused on those courses at the expense of other electives. Which doesn’t mean they aren’t admitting some outside of that small bubble as both our our schools examples demonstrate, but statistically those examples are the small minority.
- The data is either wrong or misrepresented. Of this option, misrepresentation seems more likely than wrong – i.e. they are counting more “honors” than just AP/IB/DE but aren’t saying so. And if they are doing this, are they merely doing so for the purpose of their class profile, or are they for the purpose of their admissions process? Having not seen a UC application in a very long time, I have no idea if they would even have the data necessary to consider other “honors” courses beyond AP/IB/DE for OOS applicants.
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As UC Forum Champion, I cannot shed any more light on how the UC’s are determining the OOS Honors course numbers/information other than what is stated on their website.
This UC information video presented by UCSB explains OOS admissions:
I have noticed that the UC website Freshman profile for each admission year would state the Honors course information but it is no longer listed as of 2020. I did find this information in a UC counselor’s resource document but it is only for In-state admits for 2020.
See last column: University of California Counselors
All I can say is that with the reduction in OOS enrollment numbers and emphasis on admitting more in-state applicants, that UC’s will continue to be very competitive for OOS applicants regardless.
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The honor count for UCSD(10-11 and not 10-12 like UCLA) is much lower and a reasonable number. No reason to think the number would drop so much going from UCLA to UCSD.
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Are these numbers counting semesters as individual honors classes, or are they counting both semester as one honors class? (for example, AP Chemistry 1st semester + AP Chemistry 2nd semester = 2 honors class or AP Chemistry (both semesters) = 1 honors class)
I believe that each semester of an AP/DE/IB class is counted as 1 honors unit for the UC GPA. This would also explain the ridiculous amount of honors classes people are seeing on these figures.
The honors courses are counted as semesters so AP Chemistry which is a year long class would be counted as 2 semesters.
Here is UCSB’s Freshman profile data for 2021 with an average of 17 semesters of Honors courses. New Freshmen Profile | Office of Budget & Planning
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They count semesters and I divided by 2 to convert to full-year course equivalents. For example, I noted 18 full-year courses for the 75% quartile because their stat was 36 semesters of AP/IB/DE.
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