<p>He applied for BioEng for all the schools as first choice. He got into BME in JHU, which is pretty selective. UMich, Cornell, and CMU all have as good undergratude eng programs as Cal.
He ranked pretty high in national Olympiads in sciences in multiple subjects since junior year, plus other BioEng research last summer. His school has mutiple students admitted into each top schools such as MIT, Upenn, Princeton, every year. He was announced as #1 by the school in local newspaper this year. And he was the only kid in his class made the national semi finals in each of these science subject Olympiads last year. Making semifinalist in multiple subjects are even more outstanding, I think. Plus he made AIME in 4 yrs now.
It is very difficulty to take AP classes in his school because of all kinds of restrictions. So having 11 AP in junior year is very rare in his school (he didn’t have any AP as freshman).
The point is, I don’t think selectiveness of the BioEng program is the reason for his rejection in Cal. I doubt Berkeley BioEng is more selective than Princeton Eng, or UPenn BioEng, or Columbia BioEng. It is pure “holistic” randomness. </p>