But how do they know this? Do they have a sense of all of the high schools in California? We are from OOS. The application requested no information about what courses are offered our high school, and no information about how grades are distributed at our high school.
UCs do at least theoretically have some knowledge of California high schools in order to come up with a-g course listings at University of California A-G Course List , including whether to accept school-designated honors courses for honors points when recalculating HS GPA.
Your guidance counselor sends a high school profile with your childâs application materials to each school they apply to. That profile (which is public and you should be able to find it by googling your high schoolâs name and âacademic profileâ) will give them information about grade distribution, graduation rates, courses offered (# of APs included) and a host of other info that helps admission officers put the information from the studentsâ apps into perspective.
Below is an example from a local high school:
https://www.newtrier.k12.il.us/cms/lib/IL50000651/Centricity/Domain/131/2020-2021%20Profile.pdf
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UCs do not use a counselor report or recommendation letter in frosh admissions.
The profile I am referring to isnât specific to any student (it isnât a counselor report or recommendation), it is specific demographic info of the high school program.
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No expert here, but at a minimum, the UCs communicate with all of the high schools, public and private, through the ELC program. They would have a sense of grade inflation from that. Also, all schools provide their a-g classes, and the âgâ offerings would be particularly relevant for distinguishing schools.
Each high school does have a School Profile, which I wouldnât be surprised is provided to the UCs somewhere along the line.
I also wouldnât be surprised if they have AOs assigned to geographic areas, and therefore specific high schools. They would become experts in those high schools.
It isnât rocket science. Just admissions to rocket science programs. 
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Easy enough to google HS profiles if the AOâs want to dig further.
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Pretty much. In addition to the resources described above, UC also collects detailed information from the high schools through its Eligibility in Local Context program:
How UC determines schoolsâ historic GPAs
Since the inception of the ELC program, participating schools have submitted transcripts for the top 12.5 percent (15 percent beginning in 2011) of their students, with parental permission. Using this information, we have established a historic, or benchmark, GPA representing the expected GPA for the top 9 percent of the students from each school.
Schools are periodically requested to submit transcripts so that we can monitor â and reset, if necessary â their benchmark GPA. University of California Counselors
As for out-of-state applicants, I imagine UC is evaluating applicants using similar methods to the other 1700+ colleges that are not requiring submission of test scores.
Experts in a few well known high schools? Yes. In all schools? I donât think so.
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I donât see why not. They have the ELC data. They have the school profiles. They review the same high schoolsâ applicants year after year.
I donât know how many high schools each AO is assigned, but even if it were 1,000, I think an AO could keep those schools straight enough to do their jobs. Especially after doing the same job for a few years.
Other AOs in other college admissions offices do just fine getting to know high schools.
ETA: For context, there are 3,892 high schools in California. 3,162 public and 730 private. I just googled âadmissions officers UCLAâ, and you can find out who is assigned to each county. There are 7 assigned to 57 different counties, and for LA county there are 10 assigned to specific high schools (5 included in the 7 above). For LA they also have Bruins Ambassadors, paid college students who visit high schools and do events and participate in committees. Looks like one AO has Orange County and 28 high schools in LA. That doesnât sound too onerous for a person to learn their assigned high schools.
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i just googled my S20âs HS. I knew it was rough, but wow. this surprised me.
35% of kids took at least 1 AP exam; 16% pass rate.
Math proficiency: 16%. Reading: 26%.
Av. ACT: 18.
Graduation Rate: 86%.
To me, this signals grade inflation - they are boosting the grades to get kids graduated. (itâs not in california. But, I just wonder, how with those type of stats, wouldnât it help a kid stand out with a high ACT? ) still trying to understand this all, but Iâve come a long way.
To me, being an expert means more than knowing some HS profiles. Itâs the question of degree. A typical regional AO covers lots of schools and we canât expect her/him to know in-depth all the schools s/he covers.
It is a huge problem, nationwide. The only people that argue otherwise are those adamantly against tests. I know several people in education, and the real grade inflation numbers at many affluent high schools are much worse than what is published. These are towns where the average home price was close to a million dollars before the current housing bubble, and realtors would tell prospective home buyers how many kids the local high school sent to Ivy league schools while they were showing houses. Do you think the Superintendents in those kinds of towns have some pressure to deliver more Ivy leaguers and T20 school attendees? TO and test blind is manna from heaven for those Superintendents, because all they have to do now is give out more Aâs.
Sure we can.
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Boosting D grades to C grades to âget kids graduatedâ is grade inflation in perhaps its most problematic form; schools are shirking their responsibility to educate kids. But this isnât the type of grade inflation that will impact admissions at UC schools. The average grade point at a school doesnât impact admissions when the accepted students generally are only coming from the top decile of the class.
As for how to stand out at this (or any) type of school, the most effective strategy for UC admissions would be to take on all the rigor the school had to offer and to do very well relative to the rest of the students in the school. Having a high ACT score without having the high class rank and rigor would not have cut it even before UC went test blind.
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So youâll rank some student with 3.8 GPA above another student with 3.78 GPA? How are you going to compare rigor between two students? Number of APs they took? One student with 12 APs must have more rigor than another one with 10 APs?
Test optional admission considers more than just GPA in isolation. All the Ivy league and T20 colleges were test optional or test blind in the previous admission cycle. Why do you think many of these same colleges reported record numbers of low/middle SES during this test optional admissions cycle, rather than increased enrollment from the affluent high average SAT districts upon going test optional?
For example, Harvard reports:
âItâs very gratifying â this is the first time that Harvard has broken 20 percent in terms of first-generation college students. And itâs the first time weâve broken 20 percent for Pell Grant recipients,â Fitzsimmons said. âThe economic diversity is certainly something weâve never seen before on this scale.â
Yale reports:
the percentage of students in the first-year class receiving Federal Pell Grants, which are awarded to low-income students, has increased from 12% to over 20%.
Princeton reports:
Princetonâs Class of 2025 arrives from across the country and around the globe, embracing record number of first-gen and lower-income students
Dartmouth reports:
The prospective class includes 17.2% who are projected to be eligible for Pell grants, which are federal awards offered to students from the lowest socioeconomic quartile, a new record.
âŠ
A record-high 17% of students are the first generation in their family to attend college.
But other colleges require a counselor report which gives information about the local opportunities and the studentâs general performance at the school. The UCs are not asking for this.
I donât think anyone from our local HS has applied to the UC schools recently. I sure the GC at the school doesnât even know that my kid applied because thatâs the kind of school that we have in our town, so the GC is not sending anything to the UC schools.
I looked up what our HS has online for the HS profile, and it contains (1) vague descriptions of our town and HS (âour high school has 4 buildingsâ), (2) average SAT and ACT scores, (3) a general statement that honors classes and AP classes are offered (with no mention of how many), and (4) the percentage of kids that go to 4-year/2-year/military/work. It looked nothing like the report that beebee3 linked. It was 2 pages, black and white, with lots of white space.
I suppose that some AO at each of the UC schools could find this school report on Google like I did, but itâs hard for me to believe that AOs have the time to do that. Iâm confident that this report does not give any information about how my kid did relative to others at our high school. So I have no idea how the AO are going to distinguish between my kid and other OOS students.
Iâm afraid I donât understand your question? Thatâs not how UC admission decisions are made, and there isnât much point in entertaining hypotheticals that donât reflect how UC admission works.
Regarding the sentence of mine you quoted, this is some of what the UC Senate Task Force Report said about high test scores and low grades:
The Task Force found that test scores appear to receive less weight in admission than high school grades: for example, for every campus, the admit rate is much higher for applicants with high HSGPA and low SATs than for those with high SATs and low HSGPAs. https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf
Thus my comment to @bgbg4us regarding the importance of grades over test scores.
Last I checked, high schools allow D grades (barely passing) to count for credit toward graduation. So a student can graduate high school with a 1.0 GPA consisting of all D grades.