Cal Poly SLO is clear on their website that applicants should include any classes taken for HS credit in 7th and 8th grade.
SLO also has a full range of detailed video tutorials accessible from their website, weekly application workshops during the fall that applicants can attend to learn the app process and ask questions, and the help function in the app itself is good/accurate.
The general CSU application guide also covers entering math and FL from middle school on p23.
Completing college applications is a detail oriented processâŠSLO is certainly offering a lot of educational resources for applicants.
SLO isnât the best example as they give a lot of bonus points for local students, students whose parents didnât graduate high school, and students from 66%+ low income schools. I think the CS spots get filled with those kids since itâs so popular.
If you look at San Jose Stateâs index for CS you can see you need a 4.3 CSU gpa (which caps honors/AP classes to 8 semesters) which is pretty much impossible for a kid who takes a lot of community college or extra high school courses. Or, you get a boost for being local, veteran, first gen, etc.
So Iâm mover surprised a high stats kid doesnât get into SLO for one of their top majors.
Those are important considerations as well, but one might expect a public institution to worry a bit about losing both the trust and the support of the middle class taxpayers financing it.
Capped and weighted is a stat, but it is a stat which homogenizes stats across the state. The goal is to not penalize areas which have fewer offerings but the end result when combined with grade inflation is a huge vat of indistinguishable.
Honors and AP are counted the same and then the total is limited to 8 courses. If one wanted to optimize for CSU they would take exactly 8 honors courses while making sure they nailed their A-G requirements. This would likely generate better grades with less rigor but max the capped and weighted GPA.
The âsocial engineeringâ is making sure that there is access to everyone and every area of the state. This is a good goal, I am all for it. The challenge is that when you combine the effects of capped and weighted with test blind you have created a scenario of âsince everyone is special, nobody is specialâ so how does the âstats based admissionsâ really reflect stats in this scenario?
Capped and weighted with testing might work and uncapped but weighted without testing might work but the combination of the two policies creates a situation where an honors course from Inyo is worth the same as a rigorous AP course from Gunn when everyone knows the difference.
CA needs a system which creates access for all regions while not masking and penalizing achievement as it now does.
CPSLOâs bonus points for courses beyond the CSU minimum may counter that (bonus points are given for extra courses in science, English, foreign language, and arts, though math gets bigger bonus points).
But CPSLO is an outlier in many ways among California public universities. Note that while the weighted-capped GPA issue mentioned above affects CSUs generally, most majors at most CSUs are not so selective that straight-A applicants have to worry about extra courses diluting their weighted-capped GPA (perhaps CS at SJSU may have this issue, but many majors across the CSU system admit at 2.5). For UCs, admission readers see all three recalculated GPAs (unweighted, weighted-capped, fully weighted) as well as the full course list in making their holistic readings (where they could see the extra courses taken, etc.), so it is not like the quirks of a specific GPA recalculation necessarily dominate the evaluation.
I have been thinking a lot about your thoughtful post for the last week or so, and I wanted to return to your point that the angst in this thread seems almost entirely about the experiences of a very small number of college applicants who are not only academically strong kids (likely to thrive anywhere) but also are relatively affluent compared to the U.S. population as a whole. Fair enough given that reflects the population of frequent posters on CC (including my family), but I think that lens really means that the focus of most posts has not been on the question Is the college admissions process broken? It has been on the question Is the college admissions process broken for students aiming for elite private and public colleges? Or even Is the college admissions process broken for high stats students aiming for elite private and public colleges?
I dropped out of the thread because eventually, it became dull to me. It seemed to be looping endlessly on a few questions 1) standardized tests and whether or not they would be the magic bullet that would make college admissions less broken for certain kids and 2) how transparent/non-transparent and fair/unfair holistic admissions is and 3) how many colleges most students must apply to in order to receive at least one affordable acceptance that will match their interests/needs. For reasons that continue to baffle me, most of the focus (as always) seemed to be on the interests/needs of STEM students. I understand that others find these questions interesting --actually, I find the questions quite interesting as well, I just find the answers repetitive. Also, if no one is going to change their mind then why keep repeating the same points? It is clear to me that most posters understand each other. They just donât agree with each other.
That was a long-winded way of explaining where I am coming from in my thoughts, which are also mostly focused on the colleges of interest to my children and their friends --that is selective residential colleges, particularly those that offer enough financial aid to be affordable to lower and middle-income families.
Colleges offering merit aid should make merit aid levels clearer (without digging around on websites) and factor that information into their net price calculators, which should be more detailed in output. I realize that some colleges already have tables & grids with merit aid information, but many do not. If receiving a merit scholarship is highly competitive, the net price calculator should list the possible range of aid after running the calculator(from needs-only to need+merit) along with a clear statement that only X% of applicants can expect to receive a merit scholarship.
As much as possible, all EA decisions should be available by Dec 31 and all EA/ED/rolling decisions should include the full financial aid package that the college plans to award.
I think that well-resourced colleges could do a better job screening applicants if they requested that teachers upload graded samples of the studentâs work along with their letter of recommendation. This could include literary essays, research papers in any field, graded math exams, or even creative works. Yes, I am aware that such a requirement would increase the length of time and burden placed admissions officers reviewing applicants. And it might be untenable for that reason alone. I do think this sort of upload would have to be done by the teacher (not the student). I think it would be a more accurate representation of a studentâs skills and achievement in the humanities and social sciences than the ERBW SAT score, and it might be helpful to create context for students coming out of schools with a lot of grade inflation.
If these selective colleges really are looking for more students who are good at collaboration and potential leaders, is there a better way of assessing those traits? I donât know anything about the Posse Foundationâs Dynamic Assessment Process except that I am under the impression that the whole process helps identify studentsâ soft skills and potential to become leaders and innovators. Is there a way of creating a similar process that can be scaled up to identify students not just for Posse but for colleges in general? Or what are the pros/cons of having more colleges like Brown and Bowdoin include a short video upload with the application? I can imagine some problems (racism, bias, ablism, appearance judgments), but maybe the pros would outweigh the cons and the colleges that want to practice holistic admissions could get a better understanding of their applicants beyond the supplemental essays.
Would it be helpful if more colleges clearly signaled the competitiveness of each of their fields? Obviously this issue is already a known factor at colleges with impacted majors, but if an admissions office really does want to make sure they admit students interested in all of their majors (not just the most popular ones), could they just be clearer and more upfront that they are looking for students interested in say renaissance studies as well as finance and computer science and that students who want to study the most popular majors will actually experience lower admissions rates than average. At my daughtersâ schools, the college offices are saying outright to kids that applying to certain schools as a STEM major will hurt their chances. I hate that this is âinsiderâ knowledge. It seems unfair.
Over the last couple of weeks, Iâve thought a lot about the proposal for a national university based where admission is based entirely on a single high stakes entrance test. I think it would represent a drop in the admissions bucket and I wonder if it would really be as wonderful of an learning atmosphere as people imagine. That said, sure, why not? I know that even my most stemmy kid would not be interested in such a college, but if some kids might like it, and some big donors could be found to fund it, maybe it would a fantastic place for some students. It would certainly provide more certainty to those kids early in the college admissions process if they know that as long as they reach a certain score, they will be guaranteed a spot at the college.
He has a 4.42 W from Gunn, no? Granted thatâs not calculated for CSU but I donât think he was hurting on the gpa front.
A question to be asked is what student has the qualifications to make it into UT Austin and UMaryland in CS as an OOS Asian male yet not make it into Cal Ploy SLO for CS? Is that the student CSU is willing to surrender to an OOS flagship?
He was on a couple of interviews with local news and he and his family seem to savvy enough⊠as he and his dad denied any missteps on the apps, I think the odds of him missing a requirement are quite low (albeit still possible). Anyway itâs a mystery wrt SLO but as an applicant, I would have just run with UT and lived happily ever after. The family seems more affected by the lack of clarity than the results. At least thatâs what they claim they are battling by making his case more public.
SLO is a very tough admit for CS! Some students get into Stanford (for example), but not SLO.
Probably the biggest factor here is that the CA publics are test blind, so this studentâs stats looked better to OOS schools.
Lots of CA students come to this site for a âchance meâ with this sort of profile (very high SAT, good GPA but not necessarily the highest GPA in their school), and they are advised to apply to a wide range of CA publics (not just the most selective ones), while also including some OOS and/or private schools that will use the high standardized test score in admissions.
Yes understood. SLO as you probably know is the new golden ticket for many Bay Area suburban applicants. Many families are very happy there. And for CS itâs very tough indeed. ( I personally know of a UCLA/UMich/Gtech CS admit w/ an SLO waitlist.) All indications are though that Stanleyâs gpa is good perhaps great. (3.97UW 4.42w) So Iâm still looking beyond that for the reason to deny.
Using that personal example of mine, is it right for a UCLA acceptance alongside a SLO waitlist? It almost looks like yield protection although that canât be. Anyway random results happen but the complaints are heard more often now. Canât tell yet if itâs all warranted or not.
Itâs tempting for people to say (and people say it ALL THE TIME on this site) that if a kid got into a more selective school like UCLA, UCB, Stanford, etc, they âshouldâ have also gotten in to the less selective schools on their list and if not, something isnât right.
Different schools have different ways of making their admission decisions, so a set of decisions for an individual kid isnât necessarily going to line up with the overall selectivity of each school. UCLAâs holistic process worked for that particular kid. SLO didnât have room for that kid.
There are so many highly qualified kids applying to these schools for CS. They canât all be admitted everywhere. However, highly qualified kids who apply to a range of schools are going to get in somewhere.
I keep hoping that the weaker current job market in CS might reduce the frenzy for so many kids to apply to this majorâŠ
Edit to add⊠my kidâs GPA was the same, and he would not have expected an admit to the CS major from SLO or any of the schools listed. Of his friends who got into CS at schools like that, they mostly had even stronger grades, along with great ECs.
Ok, my last comments here on Stanley and the UCs: The personal story I know re: UCLA/SLO had the same gpa as Stanley but at a slightly less rigorous HS that is nearby. While the results you (and I) speak of are indeed true,witnessed, and numerous, are these kinds of results within a confined context (ie UCs + CSUs + CCs) what california wants? Ultimately this kind of unpredictability leads to the increased app counts weâve been witnessing.
There are just so, so, many great kids with this GPA in CA, who are honestly great kids, with great ECs and great everything, wanting to get in to the CS major in a small set of schools. So many applicants and just not enough spots.
And once they get in, the programs have already expanded past capacity, even (especially?) at schools considered âdream schoolsâ by many⊠to the point that the majority of these schools are scrambling to educate the number of CS majors that they have!
I donât think anyone doubts this applicantâs aptitude or achievement, but that isnât what the California public system is making admission decisions upon, clearly. Plenty of other factors weighed against him which he canât control-attending a good school, being from a good neighborhood, and yes, being one of many Asian males in that major ( yes, I think the UC schools do manage to consider that factor, regardless of the laws, under the guise of disadvantage).
The good news is other states will gain from California driving such talent away.
Publishing its admission formula (a reverse engineered version of a previous version of the CPSLO admission formula has been floating around for a while).
Publishing the most recent admission thresholds by major.
Some other CSUs like SJSU do exactly that, so it is not impossible to do.
Given how CPSLO criteria differ from that of UCs, it should not be too surprising that there are students who got into UCs but not CPSLO.
Planning to apply to college in 2025: can I assume that:
most schools will require SAT/ACT?
Even though a (small?) number of selective schools will remain TO, admission officers will still prefer candidates who submit high test scores as opposed to no test scores?
The standard rule is to aim/retake SAT/ACT until I can show the top 25% percentile for each school on my list?
Most schools will not require tests for class of 2025.
Check the testing policies for the schools on your working list. Generally, students should prepare for and take an SAT/ACTâŠa relatively high score can only help you, not only for admission, but possibly for merit aid too.
Again, generally, aim for at least the 25%ile at any given school. But there are exceptions.
Itâs difficult to give more specific advice without some contextâŠstats, HS, whether you are hooked, target major, current list, etc.
