UC Berkeley vs. Ivy Leagues

ThankYouforHelp
Mon, 28 Mar 2016 18:35:47 +0000

I don’t understand. Why is it “too bad” for Berkeley?

Berkeley chooses to weigh grades and achievement vis a vis the rest of your high school (whatever high school it is) more heavily than standardized test scores. The ones who get in are the super hard working overachievers from across the social spectrum of California, even those communities that don’t produce as many top SAT scores. That’s who the Regents want.

People who apply to Berkeley should be made aware of this, or they are likely to be disappointed when they get rejected thinking that Berkeley had the same admissions difficulty as other colleges with an equivalent SAT average. It doesn’t. There is a reason that Berkeley accepts less than 17% of applicants while many colleges with equivalent standardized test scores offer admission to well over 50% of their applicants.

To use a real life example, Naviance tells me that my childrens’ prep school easily could place over half the graduating class at NYU or Boston College every year if the students wanted to go there. It can only get a few into Berkeley every year, because Berkeley only wants the very top of the class. NYU and BC are great schools and have the same average SAT scores as Berkeley, but they are substantially easier to get into than Berkeley.

Comparing colleges by standardized test scores is a convenient shorthand tool for selectivity, but it doesn’t work very well in this case.