<p>As the title asks… Please don’t be harsh in your answers. My school calculated my chances and all the people around me thought I would get into UCLA, but I didn’t. Just trying to gather what to expect, should I lose hope over the Ivies I applied to? A lot of people at school with worse credentials than mine or on par with mine got accepted at UCLA, so I’m sort of confused.</p>
<p>Thanks in advance! Again, please be kind even if you think this is a stupid question, I am a bit sad right now!</p>
<p>Well, to be honest, there’s not much you can do about the admissions process right now, so you might as well not worry about whether the Ivies will accept you or not. Good luck with the rest of your applications, though :)</p>
<p>^Agreed with above poster. The simple, short answer to your question is yes. Decisions from different colleges are independent of each other, so your result from UCLA has no bearing on your upcoming results from the Ivies. Since all of your applications have already been filed, the chances that you will be admitted to an ivy would not change even if you had been addmitted to UCLA.
UCLA is just one school, so don’t worry about it. Try to relax until you get the rest of your college news back.</p>
<p>While the UC’s do ‘holistic’ review, like other state schools they are pretty stats oriented. Ivies do a more holistic review and consider more things including race. So yes, it’s quite possible.</p>
<p>Agree with hmom5. The Ivies can be more forgiving about “holes” in the application or stats if the applicant has something else to offer that they want.</p>
<p>My impression is that UC’s in general, and UCLA in particular, place more emphasis on GPA and class rank in relation to SAT’s than do other selective colleges. A possible reason for this being their exclusion from AA, so that to obtain urm diversity for which they hanker, they adopt a strategy of accepting top students from high schools regardless of SAT, which will snag some urms from some high schools in which their isn’t a particular abundance of high SAT scores.</p>
<p>The evidence for UCLA demphasis on SAT’s is found in the SAT 25-75%. Their overall average is relatively low for a school accepting only 24% of applicants, with an especially low SAT 25% tail. See the comparison here with [UCB</a>, NYU and USC](<a href=“College Navigator - Compare Institutions”>College Navigator - Compare Institutions). These low SAT’s must indicate that admissions is based moreso on class rank and GPA than SAT’s.</p>
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<p>From your example, one would think that UCLA (and UCB) was more selective than Emory, even though the percentage accepted is nearly the same. However, [Emory’s</a> SAT’s](<a href=“College Navigator - Compare Institutions”>College Navigator - Compare Institutions) are significantly higher than both UC’s. The answer here too must be that the UC’s pay less attention to SAT scores.</p>
<p>^Or that UC’s, getting the vast majority from a state with a terrible K-12 system, doesn’t see the high GPA’s colleges getting applicants from all over the world do.</p>
<p>That’s another scenario that could result in admission to a top college. A not inflated GPA (went to a CA school that doesn’t have 20 vals with 4.7’s) and a high SAT score.</p>
<p>You definitely can get into an Ivy if rejected by UCLA;
good friend of mine just got rejected and is shocked, he already got into not only caltech but got a likely letter from cornell (not an athlete, he’s a math and physics guy)</p>
<p>Of course. You’ve got a couple of quite common possibilities: </p>
<p>1) Applicant should have got into UCLA but was rejected by incompetence, error, or personal prejudice on the part of the adcom (or pair of adcoms I believe are used at UCLA). </p>
<p>2) Applicant was reasonably rejected at UCLA, and better fit the profile of what that particular Ivy was looking for that particular year, so was reasonably accepted into that Ivy.</p>
<p>Lastly, UCLA’s 22% acceptance rate is not that different from some Ivies that accept about 15% or 18% of applicants. therefore, there will be the normal random results where both institutions should likely accept the applicant (or both should reject), and UCLA didn’t but the Ivy did.</p>
<p>UCs look at SATs from one sitting only; they do not superscore. UCs unweight all but specific classes, making all students and schools look the same. This evens the playing field for honors and AP classes compared to regular high school classes. UCs don’t take into account difficulty of high school curriculum or high school competition. All of this makes UCs biased against private schools and high achieving public school students.</p>
<p>There’s no such thing as your school “calculated your chances”. It’s not official; college admissions are in no way officially calculated before you apply. Everything is an assumption or estimated guess.</p>
<p>Yes, you can still get into an Ivy if you got rejected from UCLA. They’re two entirely different schools with completely different ways of evaluating your application.</p>
<p>^(re: post#13) Indeed, one of the best strategies of maximizing your chance, perversely, is to go to a bad HS in California (there are tons to choose from), assuming you won’t get affected by bad influence from the peers.</p>
<p>Sure. The UC’s have a very quantitative system for admissions, almost purely based on GPA and standardized testing. UCLA is also pretty damn hard for OOS.</p>
<p>Another thing about UC’s, is they don’t bother even asking for senior year first semester grades. Nor do they look at Freshman grades, so a student could show all sorts of progression, but UC’s are blind to it.</p>
<p>My S got all A’s last Semester Jr year, and first Semester senior year. His UC W GPA increased from 3.96 to 4.1. You’d think 4.1 with 2270 SAT’s would be garner an acceptance, but UCLA saw neither the 4.1, nor the progression.</p>
<p>The whole UC application process seems to operate as if it were a group of overwhelmed bureaucrats, barely able to handle the mountain of applicants, uninterested in giving any applicant that doesn’t fit within their rigid formula any consideration.</p>
<p>With the exception of the first statement, all of the others are incorrect. Yes, the UCs only use one sitting for SAT/ACT. UCs do not unweight anything – just the opposite, they weight UC-approved honors and AP/IB academic courses. The UCs do in fact take into account high school curriculum, which is why they calculate a UC gpa, which is both capped (for admissions eligibility only), and uncapped for admissions review. Thus, UCLA or Cal will go deep into the senior class of a highly competitive HS, but only accept the Val and Sal at Podunk HS. But, unfortunately, one campus cannot accept every strong kid from the same high school, so yes, class rank (“ELC”) matters.</p>
<p>People who make statements about UC students benefit from the grade inflation & crappy K-12 school systems clearly have no idea what they’re talking about. </p>
<p>And average at Berkeley is 4.35. The people they admit clearly took many AP/Honors classes. Unless someone can prove that CA students score lower on the AP exams than other states, how can you make a claim that CA high schools are weaker?</p>
<p>UCB would appear to have an advantage based on the school profiles, as the SAT’s are the same, but UCB’s GPA higher. The 2007 CN figures however, give USC a significant SAT advantage, as if UCB placed a greater emphasis on GPA, and USC SAT.</p>