ya’ll idk how i got into poly. guessing because my major is very uncommon.
SAT: a whopping 1080
GPA: 3.88
Major: Music
good luck to all of you who are either waitlisted or still waiting to hear back. Hopefully this next wave isn’t just rejection letters…
Similar to the comment above, I have been fascinated by the level of interest and volume of activity on this thread. After reading many of the comments, we feel fortunate that our daughter was accepted on 3/2 with the following stats.
Major: Statistics
In State
CS GPA: 4.2
SAT: 1420
Rigor: max
MCA: ~4500 (not sure how to score the ECs)
Seeing the stats of people waitlisted and declined caused me to look back on the acceptances at my D’s school, what I would classify as a very good, but not top tier, public high school in the Silicon Valley.
Seniors Choosing CP-SLO:
2015: 9
2016: 10
2017: 25
It wouldn’t surprise me if CP cut its acceptances by half or more at our school after the spike last year. Luckily our D was not on the bubble. Anecdotally, Cal Poly is very popular in the South Bay Area even at the top private and top tier public schools where many students post big MCA scores. Purely speculating, but I bet they have raised the bar for schools or locales where they have seen a large spike like ours.
I would be interested to know if anyone thought they were passed over within their major within their high school. Is Cal Poly skipping the ivy league candidates at the high stat schools for students more likely to accept, or are the top students that chose CP as a safety receiving the acceptances, leaving those with relatively high qualifications getting waitlisted or declined?
I’m sure this has been mentioned before, but waitlisters had until today to confirm that they wish to hold their spot on the waitlist. I’m guessing more notifications one way or the other will go out depending on the numbers of confirmed waitlisters.
It is really a disservice to future applicants to make speculations on admissions practices that have been refuted time and time again. This “skipping the Ivy League candidates” at “top private and top tier public schools” is the latest in a long line of CP admissions yield protection conspiracy theories. Again, if CP, as a public university were to engage in such practices it would be a criminal conspiracy involving hundreds of people. Does that seem even slightly plausible to you?
Quite a few “Ivy League candidates” never matriculate at an Ivy as the admit rate at several of these schools is below 6%. I would like to know how CP admissions, a priori, is able to discern those likely to matriculate at an Ivy. Quite a large number of Ivy rejects look exactly like Ivy admits- particularly when looking at objective criteria- which is the only thing that the CP admissions staff has access to via the CSU application.
Are you proposing some magical cutoff? An ACT above 35? Well, a large number of students are admitted to CP with exactly those scores. And several kids from my son’s competitive high school were admitted to CP and the Ivies- I guess CP forgot to “skip” them!
It is likely that most kids accepted to the Ivies also get accepted to CP (the reverse is definitely not true) as even on a generic CP application an Ivy kid would shine. The only exception to this is with few intensely competitive majors such as CS, AE, and ME. Admits to these majors likely have MCAs above 4,800 and thus extremely high GPA/ACT combos. It is here where the “high stat” kid may get shut out by someone with a slightly higher MCA. And CP has no idea that this “high stat” kid is Ivy material (i.e. state debate champ, concert pianist, etc…) because the CP app does not allow for such distinctions.
Congrats to your daughter. I am glad she is majoring in statistics. Undoubtedly her training will be of use to you in understanding CP admissions!
@mmadness, the easiest way to know that CP doesn’t reject “Ivy candidates” is to look at the average accepted student stats. In the college of engineering it’s something like GPA 4.13 and SAT 1463. Add to that the fact that several of the CENG majors are not competitive, dragging the mean down. You can’t hit that average without VERY high stats students.
Still “no determination” for Aerospace Engineering
Fair enough. I shouldn’t have bashed SLO while praising another school. It was my frustration boiling over. And it was untrue and unfair. Both are excellent engineering schools, and any student would be lucky and praiseworthy for gaining entry.
“Congrats to your daughter. I am glad she is majoring in statistics. Undoubtedly her training will be of use to you in understanding CP admissions!”
Savage
One thing that’s never mentioned whenever “yield protection” is brought up is why on earth would a mid-size regional state school engage in this practice in the first place? Of what possible benefit is it to exclude the very best students? Some would argue that it’s to move up in the rankings, but there are two problems with that; 1) Cal Poly is not even in the national rankings, just the western region, 2) yield doesn’t enter into the USNWR rankings (at least not directly). Read the ranking criteria here https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights. The only place where yield would matter is in admissions rate (high yield means lower admissions rate so more points). But admissions rate is only worth 10% of the “Selectivity” portion (12.5% of total), so overall 1.25% of the total score. On the other hand, student stats are worth the other 90% of selectivity, and would also have an impact on graduation and retention rates, which together make up over 30% of the score. So we’re to believe that Cal Poly rejects high stats students to protect 1% of their ranking score, at the expense of 30% of the score? And as @choroidal pointed out, how can Cal Poly possibly predict which high stats students are likely to accept and which aren’t based solely on GPA, test scores, class schedule, and zip code? They can’t. There are some who claim that Cal Poly has some secret sauce that tells them how likely you are to accept based on which school you attend, but if their methods are so sophisticated, how on earth did they underestimate their yield numbers by 5 percentage points last year?
I’m afraid that using Occam’s razor is the best approach here…accept the simplest explanation; Cal Poly calculates a score for each student, ranks by that score, establishes a cutoff and accepts those above the cutoff. That’s how all the other CSUs do it, the only difference being that they use the EI, and Cal Poly has it’s MCA.
Sorry, rant off. This one’s been stewing for two years now.
I think you completely misunderstood my point. I do not believe that CP is passing over top students either. However, I have seen multiple posts on this thread where people have claimed high MCA scores, 5000+ in some cases, where they were waitlisted or declined. What is your explanation for that? In your long diatribe, I don’t see it.
I was merely suggesting that each person’s MCA score needs to be put in the context of the scores of other people applying from their school or locale and not the statewide scores as people are doing on this thread. I was trying to offer an explanation for how a score of 5000 could get waitlisted, and was looking to see if anyone had evidence to refute it.
@mmadness there is only one post I’m aware of where a claimed 5000+ was waitlisted. The jury is still out on that one since 700 points of that score were for CSU faculty. If the 700 is only for CP employees, then the score fell below the cutoff for CS. It’s far more likely self reported MCA scores are inaccurate. Most people use the wrong GPA, we don’t really know how ACT scores are concorded with SAT any longer, we likely don’t know the exact weighting either. But I think there is sufficient evidence that accurate high MCAs get in, lower scores do not. In past years, many people with self reported high MCA scores were denied due to errors on their applications. Many forget 8th grade course work (although that was supposed to not be an issue this year), some list their science classes under the wrong a-g category. Even mis-typing the name of your classes can lose a-g credit. There are so many ways to mess up on the application and CP is extremely unforgiving of mistakes.
@MelloG thanks for the detailed explanation. Didn’t mean to rile people up.
My daughter waitlisted for Sociology
My S replied to his waitlist email for Aerospace Engineering, but his portal still has the message that he will be contacted by email to opt-in. Is that the case for others who have opted in? I saw this question earlier in the thread. My apologies if the answer was posted already. These are anxious days. Thank you.
@Katydog did she get the news today?
@MamaLlama27 yes I also opted into the waitlist and my portal has not updated and still tell me to opt into it, even though I already have.
I just talked to admissions, to confirm that my daughter was on the waitlist, as her message was still the same too. My D replied the night she got waitlisted, but we wanted to make sure. They were very nice, and said that the portal message will remain the same with the waitlist message, until a further decision has been made, but did confirm the waitlist.
Any recent Poly Sci waitlist or acceptances?
S still undetermined for Architecture, not getting our hopes up at this point.
Any news for Clinical Nutrition Majors?