Some AP teachers will give a grade bump if you score a 4 or 5 on the exam, so if you got an A- first semester, they’ll go back and bump it to an A…
Her rationale at parent night at the start of the year, is that students and parents will be in tears at some point during the year and it will be very unlikely that kids will earn an A in the class, but you’ll all score 4’s and 5’s on the test, and you’ll be rewarded for that. I don’t I really like that approach, but that’s the hand we were dealt…
I wish. My kid received a B in AP Biology, but got a 5 on the AP exam. There was no adjustment of his GPA. There were multiple kids in that class who got Cs in the class who earned a 4 on the AP exam.
Did anyone have high gpa but Not submit scores and still get deferred? I’m feeling regret that we submitted based on learning they don’t want to bring their averages down.
Son is OOS has 3.9uw/4.8 weighted. 31 ACT (33 superscore) but I’m wondering should we or can we remove the score with our LOCI? lol or longshot. He does have straight A’s now that we will submit.
From the thread we had 17 OOS students who self-reported and were test-optional. Denied students all seemed to have an UW GPA that was less that 3.75.
UW GPAs for those deferred: 3.9, 3.7, 3.93, 3.95, 3.9
UW GPA for those accepted: 3.92, 3.8, 3.97, 3.9, 3.8, 3.8, 3.99, 3.97
On average, the accepted students had higher GPAs, but I’m not seeing an obvious pattern with the very limited data. There were four students with GPA/ACT scores similar to your son who were accepted and five similar students who were deferred (my son was one). Sorry I’m not of more help.
FWIW, from the admissions web site re: test scores:
Honestly, I would not bring attention to the test score at this point even if you could.
Just providing some info albeit late. My OOS son was directly admitted into engineering EA with a 3.83UW/4.5W and did submit his SAT score (1440). He has taken 8 AP classes and at our HS an AP class results in a 1.0 bump for GPA purposes. He has two siblings attending Wisconsin Engineering now. He has many HS friends with Wisconsin at the top of their college list who were deferred.
For those deferred, hang in there. We know quite a few kids that were initially deferred and then accepted during the RD round. Wishing everyone good luck and hoping for good news for all.
Tsunami2, thank you for the input and the encouragement. Congratulations to your son and his siblings.
Does anyone have any kind of number from coast years reflecting the likelihood of admission of deferred candidates or what the likelihood of admission is for the regular decision pool in general? (My son, despite being deferred and not rejected, believes that he has almost no chance, but he has no information to support his pessimistic conclusion.)
Thanks to all of you for your input. Good luck to all of your children.
Are you regretting submitting? What’s his major and are you OOS? This is torturous!
Honestly the thought hadn’t occurred to us, partly because his UW GPA is a little lower (3.8). I also agree with @d-one that even if we could modify it, it would draw too much attention.
My son is applying to Engineering, which makes things more difficult. He sent his scores because his ACT was in the 75th percentile at Wisconsin and we thought that might balance out his relatively lower grades. Thankfully, he also just received straight As for his first semester of this senior year. He’s taking AP Calc, AP Physics, AP Comp Sci, among his other classes, so hopefully that burnishes his engineering resume.
We are hopeful that he will eventually be accepted because Wisconsin is his favorite college by about a mile. However, he really likes his backup options and they have already admitted him for engineering.
So unreal that we are in a time when a GPA of 3.8 is thought of as “lower”. I got into Madison back in the olden days and my GPA started with a 2!!!
My son did not submit scores and had a 3.93 UW and a 5.0 W at the time of application and was deferred. He is applying to Letters and Sciences though. He got a 4.0 this past semester so hopefully that helps him too! The two friends we know whose kids got accepted to engineering OOS at Wisconsin both submitted scores so I think that was the right call.
Unweighted only for gpa. Difficulty is a separate consideration.
Are the uw gpa in the core data set recalculated by Wisconsin?
Yep. My daughter’s school didn’t give any bump for honors, just AP’s.
Yes. They convert all to UW std. 4.0 max
Thank goodness. For me, the math isn’t mathin’ on some of these self-reported weighted GPA’s, even when they list their UW and AP/Honors courses taken… 
My daughter’s school also does not weight honors classes and in order to get weight for AP or IB they must pass the AP/IB test with at least a 3 on AP tests and a 4 on IB tests.
Was anyone in IB courses
Our deferred S24 is in IB diploma (so all his JR/SR classes are IB). He went test optional so that prob didn’t help. He had a friend with a 3.8 UW in IB and 30 ACT, also deferred.
I am completely blown away by the incredible qualifications of the young men and women who were deferred. May they all get good news on March 31.
I will be interested to see what the out-of-state acceptance statistics look like for this year’s applicants. If I read correctly (the site will not let me post the link), UW-Madison’s data shows that the out-of-state (domestic students) acceptance rate dropped from 64.1% in 2021 to 51.4% in 2022 to 43.1% last year, and the school is required to enroll 3,600 in-state freshmen (from fewer than 9,800 in-state applicants in each of the last three years). It seems likely that the out-of-state acceptance rate will be less than 40% - I can only imagine how brutal the out-of-state early action acceptance rate was.
