Higher standards is not the issue IMO. I have no personal connection to IU – but I do think the.school should have published the updated standards for admission to Kelley PRIOR to the start of the application cycle rather than after students have committed to the school (and declined other acceptances which may now seem preferable).
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I understand your statement. It sounds quite valid. I wonder if the reason for IU’s abrupt change without any lead time suggests that current class size numbers are creating a crisis and that the situation dictates that they cannot accommodate a delayed policy change. This is only guesswork on my part. But it would be logical.
They should have had some idea based on prior years numbers. At the very least I think IU should have let applicants know at the start of the cycle that the requirements for admission to Kelley were being evaluated. I expect some students would have made a different college choice if they knew current fact situation. Anyway, just my opinion.
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I am pretty sure the person who did the monte Carlo simulations would not have access to the grade covariances across classes. (Someone who gets a high grade in one class will get high grades in other classes.) This means the 24% to 2% is an overestimate of the decline, probably a very, very large overestimate. (There will be a decline just not nearly as large as the down to 2% estimate. I do agree the timing of the announcement is unfair to the kids.)
Not defending IU, but IU would not know its actual numbers until after May 1. The new normal in college admissions is that most schools are having trouble estimating yield. The old yield prediction models aren’t working.
The final incoming DA commitment numbers aren’t known until after May 1. And IU would not know how many made SA this year until after freshmen IU grades were posted mid-May. It is possible that both numbers bumped up in an unanticipated way.
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I echo this observation. The last five years have resulted in drastic changes in data. The reasons are varied - Post Covid changes, Testing Optional changes, Common Application explosion in the number of apps, International students politics - whether from Covid or current policy/travel changes, disruptions in financial factors related to chaos caused by FAFSA application errors the last two years… And the last three or so years being some of the largest ever graduating high school classes nationally. All of these volatile factors simultaneously acting on the data has truly created a skew in traditional data analysis.
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This doesn’t apply directly to this thread about the updated Kelley SA requirements for next fall but it does relate to one of the tangential questions…
D26 attended Kelley’s Women’s Leadership Institute this summer. My wife sat thru the ‘parents / companions’ sessions while D26 was off doing her thing. During one of the presentations (on admissions) the speaker advised that the ADA Criteria would be increasing for fall 2025 applications. They’ve surpassed 30k apps for Kelley alone - and have a target of approximately 2k attending thru Direct Admissions to start Fall 2026 (ADA and DA review acceptance is how my wife understood it), and that plan is for classes to be 75% DA students and 25% SA “Pre-Business” path. However, it was implied that they may not make it down to 2k on DA this first time thru with increased ADA criteria, so this may be why the SA “B+” requirement came up in an attempt to tamp down the number of non-DA students who would be in line for Kelley. That part may or may not be accurate as it was my wife’s impression of what was being relayed.
The increases in the ADA Criteria were not specified - but again her impression was it would be increases in both GPA and Test Scores. She said the room got a bit more vocal from a fair number of parents who were rather upset the Criteria were going to be increased, and yet did not get the exact increases yet. She was told Kelley will likely release those updates mid July before Applications open on August 1st.
<edit: typo>
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All consistent with what IU Kelley admissions have been communicating to counselors too! They’ve been talking about increasing the DA criteria for several years, sounds like they waited a bit too long.
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Kelley is a victim of their own success IMO.
2022: 18,000+ applications
2023: 21,000+ applications
2024: 27,000+ applications
2025: Word on the street is 33,000+ applications
Numbers pulled from P&Q. IU as a whole is also experiencing a surge in applications, and an increase in the number of students committing. Could come down to a variety of factors, but I suspect its the balance of having that quintessential college experience + each individual school doing great marketing (Jacobs, Kelley, O’Neill, Hamilton-Lugar etc.)
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Agreed. Some of the students who just meet the DA criteria have very little chance of getting into a better direct admit business school. Increasing the DA criteria makes sense for IU Kelley for a number of reasons.
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But will they still take HS weighted GPA at face value from the HS transcript? If so, then they should not be surprised if HSs responded by implementing heavier weighting schemes.
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HS in Indiana, perhaps, but in other states, schools wouldn’t change their weighting systems because of one college out of state.
Often, weighting systems are either idiosyncratic (school-based, district-based) or homogeneous in the entire state with agreement if the state’s public universities.
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Inflating HS weighted GPAs does come up as a topic in school board politics. For example, here is an example from 2016 about use of a presumably heavier weighted GPA than the UC/CSU (presumably weighted-capped) GPA by a district in California:
Because UC and CSU recalculate applicants’ GPAs, that change affects only applications to non-UC/CSU schools that take weighted GPA at face value.
So it would not be out of the question that high schools in various states would consider such a thing.
Not surprising that an elite private (edit: Public) would change their weighting system to better position their students for UC/CSU admission. Beyond that, I agree with myos that I don’t see many, if any, schools changing how they calculate GPA just for admission purposes to IU Kelley.
With that said perhaps Kelley makes the minimum DA GPA for uw different than that for weighted. Regardless what they do, it has to be straighforward because they have a very lean admissions staff (of course they could hire more staff if they choose to evaluate apps in a way that requires more app reading time.)
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It was a public school district, and the change does not affect (in-state) UC/CSU admission, since UC and CSU recalculate. So the change only affects other schools like IU that take high school reported weighted GPA at face value.
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Oops forgot Gunn was a public.
Any school can change their weighting system at any point.
I doubt IU Kelley admissions is worrying about HSs changing their weighting criteria simply for DA admission…the way IU Kelley does admissions at least up until now is pretty unique.
Another example is the Iowa schools’ RAI calculator, which also does not delineate between uw or w GPA as they use the highest GPA on the transcript. AFAIK there aren’t many Iowa HSs that implemented higher than typical weighting systems to game that formula.
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Going from a 3.80 (open GPA) to a 3.8 UWGPA on a 4.0 scale or a 3.85 UWGPA I would think would cut a fair number of qualifying students. Going to a 3.9 UWGPA on a 4.0 scale would cut a quite a few. * However, this still presents the issue wrt the effects of ‘grade inflation’ verses ‘rigor’ - and I believe we see this at alot of competitive public universities trying to be fair and equitable to their whole state where 3.9-4.0 from rural counties show up on a flagship campus and get their doors blown off.
But trying to put in a WGPA makes this more complexity and variety (more work by far), because somebody has to do the recalibration. If you go by straight WGPA which is a combo of UWGPA courses AND WGPA courses, this just then favors the students who go to HS which offer multiple AP courses - because if they are able to take say 8 AP’s and do 1/2 As and 1/2 Bs, then that adds an 8 count of 4.5 to their “wgpa” versus the kid who goes to a school where there are only 3 or 4 APs. If they get 3As and 1 B, thats a 4.75 AP scale, but it’s only 4 courses. I written elsewhere where my kids have taken 10, 13, and 16 (I have to update this as my eldest took 16 APs - 8 of which were as a senior). That stacks the benefit of a ‘blended’ wgpa simply towards those kids who can take more - even if they only do so-so in their AP classes. So a recalculated WGPA to level out APs Taken by / AP Grades would be more sensible - but that also implies more work.
Increasing test scores is one way to try to adjust for ‘grade inflation’, and can be seen as a great equalizer (Ignoring the claims of bias in testing…for the ease of this argument) - however, as someone rightly pointed out - there are kids who are all about the effort and grind, who will be 3.9s but may test below the 98th% on their standardized tests… but consistent effort often outperforms high minded test takers who loaf through their first year or two of college.
We sit in a state with one of those schools Inspiro speaks of - UNC-Chapel Hill. The overall school is relatively small for a State Flagship (under 20k total undergraduate), and quite highly ranked for a public flagship. By estimates, even hitting your stats above the 75% of admitted/attending students, so 4.4 WGPA / SAT 1500+ / ACT 34 appears to only get you a proverbial coin flip chance at admissions as an instate student… OOS, good luck. And direct admit for Business School (which is among the smallest of the top 10 B-Schools) is only < 10% of applicants who even attempt it. It’s almost absurd to think it’s our flagship -public- uniuversity, but performing in the 97th++ percentile on GPAs / WGPs and test scores may earn you a coin flip chance of going.
Texas McCombs as an OOS is, by far, more restrictive - as are Michigan Ross etc etc.
Well… maybe. If it cuts down on the number of kids who apply simply because they had ADA criteria and wanted an ‘easy in’ - and then choose not to apply at all. Then it reduces the number of open admits that they have to account for up until May Day / Pay Day for securing seats.
However, for those kids who still look at IU-Kelley as their “First Choice” or who have it perhaps in their top five, if they are shut out of ADA by the raising of criteria, then I suspect they will simply drop from ADA to an application for DA Review instead - because ultimately, why not, you will still find out if you are a DA into Kelley before May-Day, and presumably, your GPA and Test Scores which would have made ADA before, would then put you in the top decile of those who are now applying DA Review - still a great candidate.
So by jumping the GPA and Test Scores to 3.85 or 3.9 and ACT to 32, perhaps you cut 25-50% of those kids who would have applied ADA - I’d wager a guess they just drop to DA Review…and that number of increases is a lot of work for staff to do ‘holistic review’ of those stellar candidate applications.
Maybe increasing the ADA would be coupled with putting a floor threshold on who can apply for DA review… so what it ends up doing is telling kids we’ve increased the criteria for ADA, which pushes the a large number of kids who are great candidates into holistic review - and they are still much more likely to get in, than if you are a 3.7 or 3.6 uwgpa or a 28 ACT… so if you’re in those ranges, you should understand we are -highly- unlikely to DA you and probably not even allow you in as SA into the Kelley Classes.
Thereby cutting out the bottom 1/3 of applicants who currently have to go thru holistic review, and take up a lot of resources for that review with few making it through the shifter.
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An easy way to raise the criteria while being fair, and keeping in mind their admission team is small, would be to have 2 thresholds for automatic direct admit: for instance 3.75 unweighted or 4.1 weighted instate, and 3.9 unweighted or 4.4 weighted OOS.
Still not exactly fair for OOS applicants with various weighting systems but they’d have the unweighted option too.
But fair to instate rural schools etc. and imho a public flagship’s main responsibility is towards it’s state’s residents.
And that would be easily sorted.
Not sure how they can handle non automatic direct admit, as you said it’s a lot more work.
I don’t think they’d raise the ACT threshold to 32 because only ~2% students reach that bar and it’d decrease their number of applicants too much.
Yes, but as I suggested I would expect a fair number of those kids who are now NOT in ADA criteria with minor increases in those numbers, would simply drop to requests for DA Review. So Admissions moves a cluster from ADA/very little work with 100% admissions offers, to moving a cluster to DA Review that’s still likely to have a high(est) admissions offers (other than the ADA) but quintupling the work on that cluster because they go thru a DA Review process to offer 90/10 or 80/20 of that cluster admissions…seems counter productive to their problem unless they are going to ramp up the admissions office resources.
Schools that auto admit based on GPA will always have a grade inflation issue. I’m not sure having more Indiana residents is something Kelley is trying to adjust. IU Kelley is currently 75% out of state students.
IU Kelley can just use wGPA on the transcript, as they do now. If they want to recalculate GPA for all applicants, they can move to SRAR (will be called STARS staring in 8/2025), which many schools already use. The SRAR GPA weighting formula can be unique for a given school and the burden is on the applicant, not admissions staff, to enter all course and grade detail.
Many schools also weight classes that are not AP courses. Additionally, many HSs limit the number of AP courses a student can take in HS.
UNC doesn’t have much in the way of engineering majors, so makes sense to add in the size of the engineering school at NC State which is considered the state’s engineering flagship. For business schools, UIUC Gies (750 undergrads) is smaller than K-F (1,500 undergrads) both in number and relative to the state’s population.
This is all my opinion. IU Kelley has too many males (68%). Increasing GPA will cut back on the number of males meeting the direct admit criteria (males have lower HS GPAs than females.) Also, there are relatively more males with discrepant GPA and test scores…so, having a relatively low wGPA hurdle as Kelley does, along with a relatively high test score, favors males. Like I’ve said before, at my kids’ large affluent highly ranked HS in Illinois, kids in the 3rd quartile of the class regularly meet the direct admit criteria (median wGPA of the class is around 4.2, where the highest level classes are weighted at 5.33.) And a boatload of kids go to Kelley every year (way more than go to UIUC Gies… a kid in the 2nd or 3rd quartile of the class has NO chance to get in to Gies.)
Maybe, but IU Kelley could institute minimums to apply for DA review as well which would force more students, if they choose to attend IU, to go thru the standard review process in their first year.
The DA review process isn’t working well right now, IMO, when applicants with perfect GPAs and test scores that meet the minimum aren’t being accepted via review simply because their HS doesn’t print the GPA on the transcript or the student attended more than one HS. The number of review applicants that are being accepted has greatly decreased in the last several years, and favors females (because Kelley can control who they admit via review.)
I agree having a different threshold for uwGPA and wGPA makes the most sense. Applicants who don’t have a wGPA on their transcript (for whatever reason) will be affected, but that’s also the case with the DA criteria now.
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