I applied to UF back in October and even though we don’t hear back until February I’ve been stressing ever since about whether or not I will be accepted. It has been my dream to go to UF due to the fact I’ve grown up in a home where both parents are alumni. To ease stress I wanted to know what the admissions process is like? How are they making their decisions? Sure it’s a pretty general statement but I’ve heard so many things and I’m curious to get some answers.
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If you have a GPA under a 3.5, they reject you. If your GPA is over a 3.5, they put all of the names into a lottery drum, pick about half, and call the result “Holistic Admissions”.
Seriously, you should not worry about admission to UF. At this point, there is nothing you can do to positively influence the outcome, so just have fun the rest of you senior year, keep the grades up so they can’t rescind you, and make sure you have a safety or two you will be happy to go to. Good luck!!!
Don’t they seriously look at what EC’s and your Essay. I’ve heard it’s a lottery also.
Channeling the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger “it is NOT a lottery.”
@kit4kat I’ve heard that they really care about your essay. When I was at the tour they talked to us before and they expressed how important it is to them so I guess that makes them more holistic cause they don’t just automatically reject you if your scores aren’t that good. But still I can’t tell because such a wide mix of people get in. Some say it’s super hard and some say the opposite
@Zinhead That’s not necessarily true. If you look at the trends of admission you’ll notice that people above the 50th percentile almost always get in. People who claim to be rejected with 4.6 GPAs either had the worst essay possible, extremely low test scores, or did not know that UF recalculates your GPA. In a lot of the college admission threads for UF you see people posting their weighted GPA, but not their recalculated GPA which is usually lower. It’s the recalculated GPA that actually matters. At my school, 90-95% of the 100-120 seniors who apply each year always get in, so it’s definitely not a random chance factor.
@UFapplicant73461 That of course, is not typical for in-state students, where the admit rate is closer to 43%.
UF’s Admission Officers (AO’s) will tell you that 50% of admissions is based on academics (GPA, class rigor, test scores and the essay) while the other 50% is based on non-academic factors (EC’s, volunteering, work, leadership, etc.)
Of course, UF’s evaluation process is much more complicated than 50%/50%, but they like use this number to stress UF’s holistic approach, and that High School students should focus on more than GPA.
UF isn’t accepting everyone with a GPA above the 50th percentile. Holistic factors really do matter. Your chances do improve, the higher your GPA (UF puts a lot of weight on GPA and class rigor, not so much test scores), but solid EC’s can help make up for a low GPA (and poor EC’s can still hurt, even someone with a high GPA).
Admissions can appear a bit random, because it’s hard to evaluate anything other than GPA and test scores. Even GPA can be tricky to evaluate. UF considers what that GPA means in that high school, and compares students against their peers (in the same school).
For example, a student with a 4.4 GPA, may not be ranked in the top 10% or even 20% of their high school. At another school, a student with a 4.1 GPA, may be the valedictorian. UF could “like” the 4.1 GPA more than the 4.4 GPA. Maybe the 2nd high school is more rigorous/competitive, or maybe the 2nd high school is rural and simply doesn’t offer many advance classes (AP/IB/AICE) that would allow a student to drive up their weighted GPA.
Back to the original question by the poster. Knowing the above (about admissions) doesn’t really help with the stress of waiting. The best way is to follow Zinhead’s advice and let it go. Go have some fun and enjoy your senior year. 
@Gator88NE That’s true, although I was mainly trying to show that it’s not a complete lottery as he was saying. His claim was that if you have above a 3.5 they pick your name out of a hat just seems so absurd.
EDIT - Just realized that he was joking :I
Yeah, I was joking, but the holistic admissions process does produce somewhat random results. If you go back through the accepted students thread from a few years ago, you see some kids getting in with a 24 ACT, while others were denied with 32 ACT.
Some of that is geographical; UF wants to represent the entire state and it is easier to be accepted if you attend a poor rural or urban school. However, there is element of randomness when you read about kids who were denied while others in their schools with weaker test scores, grades and lower class ranks were accepted, or when you read about kids who were accepted to schools like Brown but not getting into UF.
We attended a UF admissions meeting in which the adcom stated that grades and test scores were weighted 50 percent and and the rest of the application was weighted 50 percent. Since UF does not consider letters of recommendation not can it consider legally race in admissions, 50 percent of the application consists of essays and high school activities. These are graded without any knowledge of the academic merit of the student.
Since evaluating essays is horribly subjective especially when there are teams of adcoms doing the reading, placing so much emphasis on them will add a significant amount of variation to the admission results.
@Zinhead what exactly are teams of adcom?
@Zinhead --don’t know if you are still around but I have a question. A parent just told me that UF’s admissions office told them that in the applications process public HS applicants are compared against public HS applicants, and private HS applicants are only compared against private HS applicants to insure they get the best of both. Have you ever heard or read anything about this?? Just really curious if this is true. It was described to me in explanation for why their student did not get in with a strong GPA/SAT from a rigorous private prep school curriculum. The explanation was “well the student did well but they are compared to the entire pool of other students from rigorous private prep schools so THAT pool of applicants is very competitive.” ??? Ever heard that before?
I would believe that UF admissions would do that. UF has to represent the entire state, and they have loose quotas (they won’t use that word) for admissions based on geography. If they did not, the school would be dominated by students from wealthy families in suburban areas.
Also, remember that UF cannot legally consider race in admissions, so this admissions process gives the top kids from poor rural areas like Belle Glade and Palatka a chance to get in.
^^^ +10 points for a Palatka reference!