i wanna go to UC!

Great tool, could you do one for CSU chances though?

Roger: The CSU system doesn’t release admissions statistics that are as detailed and granular as UC Statfinder was.

What does a result of No data mean? I added all of my info correctly for Uc Berkeley

Roger: It could mean quite a few things. Are you sure you calculated your GPA correctly?

Hi,
I was just wondering exactly what holy smokes means. I know if it says 60%, then that means 60% of people with my stats got in. However, I got a holy smokes for UCLA, which doesn't sound right. What would the percentage be for a holy smokes?

Roger: The statistical models that are in the calculator aren’t perfect and get kind of wonky near the extremes. “Holy smokes” just means that there is not enough meaningful data to give you an exact number, but it is probably high-ish.

Do UC's distinguish between majors in departments?

For example, would it be harder to get into EECS at Berkeley than Mechanical Engineering? Or is the difficulty the same because they are both under engineering?

Thanks!

Roger: I don’t know, but the released data categorized both of the majors you listed as Engineering.

Has any new data been released on which you can change the stats. The data it's running on is 4 years old now.

Roger: No new data has been released. UCOP has since removed the Statfinder from their website.

On the calculator section it says "put all of your grades after your 9th grade year until NOW" what does now mean? This calculator is for high school seniors? Which means you also include your senior year grades? Or how so?

Roger: Sorry if that was unclear. “Now” means literally right now. The calculator is for high school seniors, who usually apply in November, before they receive any senior year grades. Therefore, you should not include senior year grades.

I wana apply to ucsd and ucla with a 4.06 gpa but a lower 1710 sat score, im applying as an athlete. Do I have a chance?

Roger: I am not an admissions officer. I wish you good luck though!

What percentage is "holy smokes?"

Roger: It just means that you’re a positive outlier. There is no percentage threshold.

why does it go up if I go to school ranked 1 out of 10 instead of 10 out of 10. Shouldn't it go down since it's easier to get grades at 1 out of 10 schools

Roger: I’m not sure, since the results are just based on the data. I think it may have something to do with the UC’s ELC policy.

I have a GPA of 3.61 and an ACT of 31. I'm a male Asian Indian living in California and I attend Monta Vista High School. I've played baseball and football for all four years and I am also a black belt. I've also done research and I'm published in a medical book. Do I have a decent chance of getting in at santa barbara.

Roger: What does the calculator say?

I have a GPA of 3.61 and an ACT of 31. I'm a male Asian Indian living in California and I attend Monta Vista High School. I've played baseball and football for all four years and I am also a black belt. I've also done research and I'm published in a medical book. Do I have a decent chance of getting in.

Roger: I think you have an excellent chance of doing anything you want.

I am going into 12th grade in Aug-2013 - My Weighted GPA as of now is 3.81 and my SAT scores are 1920 ( M-700, R-640 & W-580) - I represent my school in the debate and also been actively involved in a charity for the last 3 years - I am interested in getting in UC davis, but the calculator say 40% chances - what does that mean ? is it high, probable or weak ?

Roger: It means that you have a good chance of being accepted. Check out the explanation below the calculator for why this is.

What year of data is this calculator using?

Roger: The data is from Fall 2009, which was the latest data available last summer.

Hey Roger, its nice to see a website like this put together. I did fairly bad the first half of my Freshman year, getting mostly C's and D's. I straight A'd my second half. Because of my poor performance my first semester, does that completely eliminate UCLA HSSEAS as an option because I am unable to make up the courses?

Roger: Colleges usually say that they favor students who show improvement, but who knows?

D0 you know if UCB college of engineering asks only for the difficulty of your classes from your counselor or if they look at the classes on your transcript itself?
Basically, I have a 4.27 UC GPA, and a 4.71 weighted GPA. My course load is significantly harder than what is being portrayed by my UC GPA. Will the COE look only at the counselor's comment that my courseload is difficult, or will it look at my transcript and look at each and every one of my classes and my grades in the classes?

Roger: I don’t know. I think you will have no problem getting accepted though.

Great work !!! In the UC application, they don't consider gender is what they say. However, in your analysis you do include gender, does UC actually consider gender?

Roger: It’s true that they don’t discriminate on basis of gender, but they also make diversity one of their goals in education. The calculator is just based on pure data. I don’t know what it means :/

Hello there, so I am freshman who did horrible their first year by receiving a C average, and due to that I am not allowed to take honors classes my sophomore year. If I manage to keep up my grades(A average) then continue with 9 extra curricular activities, due you think UCB will consider me for acceptance. Thanks for your time.

Roger: I do not know how UC Berkeley will interpret your application, but I think that showing significant improvement in your grades will help you very much.

Hello, I was using your admissions calculator and found out I will probably have my acceptance chance bogged down significantly due to receiving three D's on courses first semester of Freshman year. I understand UC's do not calculate Freshman GPA, but will this affect my A-G courses taken list in terms of failure, or a lower number of courses with a "passed" grade?

Roger: D grades on your A-G courses will be counted as not passing. However, you should have retaken those courses for a passing grade, right? I don’t know how it will affect your admissions, but if you show significant improvement in your grade average over the course of high school, it will benefit you.

I currently have a 3.65 and a 1670 SAT(I know it'll go higher), would I be eligible for UC Irvine? My extracurriculars consists of varsity sports and president for a club. I did fairly well freshman and sophomore year but terrible junior year, how much would this affect my chance of getting into irvine?

Roger: I don’t know. What does the calculator say?

You should let us put more than just 8 semesters of AP classes! Please!

Roger: I didn’t make it up. That’s just how the data was presented.

I was wondering how I could use the GPA tool if my school has trimesters (i.e 3 marking periods) instead of semesters.

Roger: Here is the UC policy on Trimester grading. The GPA tool doesn’t really work well with trimesters (sorry), but you can calculate your C/W GPA with a regular calculator by (4 × A’s) + (3 × B’s) + ... + (1 × D’s) + (up to 12 additional upper-level bonus points) divided by the total number of trimesters you accounted for. Hope that helps.

What do you mean the first option? It makes me enter my Capped Weighted UC GPA anyways.

Roger: Use the option that helps you calculate it, if you aren’t already.

Hello,

Why a question for ethnicity if UC do not consider anymore?

Roger: That is a good question. The admissions curves among different ethnic groups are actually very similar, but there are some slight variations. I put it in this calculator because it was part of the data that was released.

As in the gpa I enter is being compared to other student's weighted gpa of my school?

Roger: I’d imagine that this is the case in the actual admissions process, but the average GPA of your school is not taken into account. You should avoid entering your GPA anyway, since it’s probably not the one that the calculator expects. Use the first option to calculate it instead.

Hi! So I was using your calculator and I just wanted to confirm something. The stats being used consist of avg. weighted gpas from specific schools right?

Roger: I am not sure what you mean. Can you clarify?

Hello,
The high school that I attend isn't on your list. If I had selected a specific school would it have made a difference.

I got h.s. anyway I just am curious.

Thanks

Roger: Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

Hi Roger! Love this website, good work! I'm looking forward to becoming a computer science major and making programs like this but anyhoo I have a question.

Okay, I have a 4.19 UC Gpa, but, I know that's 10-11 grade. In the 9th grade I failed my geography class (I know, shame) but I definitely improved during my 10th and 11th grade year and got that 4.19. Im wondering if Uc's will look at that F I got in the freshman year and consider me as a weak applicant and just throw away all of my hard work I put in my 10-11 grade. Will they give me 'accident forgiveness?' or will they hold that F against me. Im just so worried about that grade and Im wondering if it will affect my chances of getting in. Btw, I want to go to UCSD. Thanks Roger!!

Roger: Hi there. I don’t know how they will interpret any particular application, but I think it would be a good idea to use the appropriate parts of your application to explain the F. Good luck!

Sigh... I got an excellent candidate for UCSC but this year I was rejected...
and I have friends with like 2.95 uw gpa's getting in when I have a 3.7...

And I got waitlisted at UCD but there are some people who I thought were more qualified than me that got rejected.

So confused D:

Hey Roger! A great program for sure!! I feel confident it is valid for the great majority of people who consistently got the same marks through high school, however, I don't think I quite agree on putting community college classes on the same GPA register due to the fact these classes were taken through the student's own audacity. Would the school not consider them as a mark of the applicant's character rather than his academic ability due to the variable nature of these classes? It seems unfair to compare one student who has taken college classes with the next who hasn't and put them on the same scale does it not? Also retaken C's: This is a personal question that I doubt anyone can answer with certainty buuuut I'd like to ask anyways as it is bothering me a little. My Freshman and Sophomore years were sort of a doozie, I got a bunch of D's and C's and all sort of wierd things that I eventually repaired the following years to my great enjoyment(ughhh). I never missed the "A" repairing those classes but there is one class that is affecting my GPA tremendously, that is an Algebra II year where I got C's both semesters. Of course I went and redid the course the following year as well as several other classes. I eventually reached Calculus BC my senior year and got top marks and a 5 on the exam. Obviously those C's from Algebra II were a fluke! Right? Would the grade really affect my chances as much as your program says?
Stats: w/o Algebra II 1st and Community College GPA: 4.09; w/ Algebra II w/o Community College 3.97; w/ Algebra II and Community College 4.01; w/o Algebra II w/ community College 4.03; SAT:730 M, 650 RC, 640 W

Roger: Hi there! Thank you for your thoughtful comment. Personally, I think many college applicants romanticize the entire admissions process a bit more than the system deserves. A lot of what I observed was simply people being accepted in the most predictable way, but things are different for everyone and there are plenty of people who will swear otherwise. It sounds like your case is indeed very different from the norm and that you’ve really turned your academic career around, and it’s true that statistical analyses like those performed by this calculator are geared primarily toward the majority. I really don’t know much about college admissions, especially outside of the UC system. The development of this calculator was more dogma than research. Who can know how a particular admissions officer will interpret your atypical academic record? At the end of the day, they are just regular men and women who try their best to act in the best interests of their institution. Good luck to you.

When you said that you can only fit 8 honors courses in your gpa calculator did you mean by year or by semester ex:ap English for my junior year : does that count as two or one since my school is semester based

Roger: It is a cap for the total number of semesters of honors courses. If you put in too many, it will only count 8.

You have a lot of haters

So I got a 58% for UCSD does that mean I will most likely get in?
Also is the fact that I go to the highschool I picked affect the chances?
I also got a 30% at LA and a 27% at Berkeley. Is the gap of selectivity between those and SD really that big???

Roger: Yes, yes, and yes.

yo

Hi,
I'm only a sophomore, but I decided to try this out.

I realized that if i change my GPA it makes smaller differences than when I move my SAT score around.

Would you say then that this means that the SAT plays a bigger role in college admissions than GPA? I always thought it was the other way around.

Also, people have been telling me that colleges look less at weighted GPA's now and instead focus in on the unweighted. Is this true?

Roger: Hi there! That’s a good question. It actually depends on where your GPA and SAT score are in comparison to the distribution of all other applicants. They have a greater effect if they’re already close to the median. Whether one is more important than the other, I do not know. To your second question, this calculator uses a GPA that isn’t fully weighted nor unweighted. That was just how the data was presented when I made this thing. I’m not sure which is more important. Good luck!

Hi Roger, great program you have here. I was wondering, you say the UC statfinder is outdated, so why don't you just use data from each UC's freshman admit profile?

Roger: Those data aren’t public, haha.

You're a fool

Roger, I saw your response to WhattheWhat. Then, I used my girl's real score. An asian female applies to UC Berkeley, major in Biological Science. Weighted GPA = 4.15. SAT Reading = 800, SAT Math = 800, SAT Writing = 730. Your analysis returns 54%. Then, I changed just ONE number: set SAT Writing score from 730 to 740. Now, the analysis return is "Holy Smoke" !!

Just 10 points makes such a big difference (from 54% to H.S )!! I cannot believe that.

Only 2 things may happen.
1) The math model used is INCORRECT.

2) UC "holistic" admission process includes factors which greatly skewed the outcome. Even the math model is correct, this calculator becomes useless because calculator deals with quantitative input only. It gives us only a false sense of confirmation on my chance getting into UC.

Roger: Actually, the results you got were fairly accurate. Any student with a 2340 (adding 10 points, like you said) SAT score will certainly get into UC Berkeley. When I extracted the data, the cumulative distribution plot basically curved off at that point. (A 54% result is nothing like a 50/50 chance, it’s an indicator that as long as your other application qualifications are decent, you will very likely be accepted. I tried to explain this as best I could, but it doesn’t make sense for most people intuitively.) Once again, this thing doesn’t calculate probabilities.

this program is completely inaccurate i changed one thing barely and it went from ":( look for another school" to "Holy Smokes!" This is a piece of junk

Roger: It works best when you put in your real stats. Care to explain what you changed?

I have a question however, is this program up to date with the recent statistics of uc admits at each particular uc?

Roger: It should be pretty up to date. The data was from the Fall 2009 admissions season which was the latest one available when I made this program this summer (Summer 2012). Since then, they’ve taken Statfinder down permanently, so this is the newest data available.

Seems to be legit, I would have thought the mid UCs were my matches too!!!

Does this take in to consideration in state vs out of state? Or does it spit out the same calculation either way?

Roger: It considers out of state and International to be the same, but they are separate from in state. That was simply the way that the data came. See section #8.

Is it possible to add Cal Poly SLO to the School list?
Also, I think Irvine is bugged. Aren't Biological Sciences impacted at Irvine? I have a 4.0 GPA and a 1760 SAT score. Plus Irvine and Davis admit students with very similar scores. However I get a Holy Smokes for Irvine and a 5X% for Davis.

Roger: I will double check the program, but all the data models were just the ones that I got from the statistics.

Update: The holy smokes threshold was a bit too low for the Irvine data. Normally, they’re set to the point where the mathematical model isn’t accurate enough to make good predictions because the GPA is too high, but in this case it was crossing the threshold too early. The Irvine case should give more accurate results now. Also, this data was gathered using the UCOP released data. Support for non-UC schools may come in the future, but I have no plans for them right now.

More brilliant work done by Roger. It would be sweet if you added more schools but this is good enough for me! :) Thanks!

Roger: Hey guys. Sorry about the trouble. There was a regression in the script while upgrading the site-wide version of jQuery. It should be working now.

Thanks for reporting the bug.

It says I didn't select a gender...but I did!

It says 'no gender selected' please fix this!

No matter what I enter, it spits out "No gender selected".

Is there a website like this for New York schools?

Roger: I don’t know of any, but they must exist.

Overall analysis: No data.

Your ACT and GPA are too unbelievable in context of your other demographics and the school you picked. It seems like your ACT were extremely high and your GPA were extremely low. No conclusions can be drawn until you go and fix this problem.

shit program