I’m looking at the following information sources, and trying to interpret the number of A-G and Honors courses given in each source:
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UC Freshman Application Data (PDF): https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/_files/documents/california-resident-freshman-application-data-2023.pdf
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Undergraduate Admissions Summary (interactive table): Undergraduate admissions summary | University of California
My question is:
- Should the ranges given for A-G and Honors courses be interpreted as SEMESTER courses, or YEAR courses? (This would make a big difference!)
There is no information on the PDF about which high school years are being counted (9-12, 10-12, etc), or whether the numbers represent semesters or years. However, the Undergraduate Admissions Summary interactive table has a note at the bottom with the following:
- A-G courses – For freshmen, the number of yearlong college preparatory courses completed or planned in 9th-12th grades.
- Honors courses – For freshmen, the number of yearlong courses taken or planned in 10th-12th grades.
I am actually starting to wonder if BOTH sources are actually showing number of SEMESTERS, and not YEARS, and maybe there is a mistake in the code generating the interactive table?
The reason I think there is a mistake is that if you select A-G courses, 100% of Freshman applicants systemwide are listed as having 25 or more A-G courses (there are a few outliers but less than 1%), see this screenshot:
The baseline A-G requirements only include 15 yearlong courses. So it would make sense for this table to have categories for <20, 20-25, and >=25 courses. But you would expect to see applicants distributed in more than one category in the table, not all clumped in the >=25 courses category (and the fact that almost all applicants are in this category means that the viewer of this page also isn’t getting any information).
A student at a school with 6 periods (many high schools in CA) would typically have only about 24 A-G courses in grades 9-12. Some students also have to fulfill their PE and other non-academic requirements during the regular high school day, and some may also take a lighter load (5 a-g courses) in senior year, which would mean that some students are going to have fewer than 24… so it doesn’t make logical sense to me that almost all students would be applying to UCs with 25 year courses or more. (Remember that the numbers above are for ALL applicants to ALL campuses!)
Furthermore, when I compare this to the numbers in the PDF, the various campuses show A-G course numbers with a middle 25%- 75% range around 44-56, so this must refer to SEMESTERS (given these numbers). However, if it’s semesters, then the middle 25%- 75% range of YEARLONG courses must be about 22-33, which would be inconsistent with the interactive table (which shows 100% of students in the >=25 category).
So I think there must be a mistake in the code generating the table, and it’s actually counting SEMESTERS when it should be counting YEARS??
