Best of luck to all of your children and I hope they are accepted early action. Last year I was feeling your pain. My OOS S24 applied EA, was deferred, waitlisted, accepted another university’s offer, and was one of a handful accepted off the UW Madison waitlist for engineering.
We just dropped him off for his second semester at Madison. He’s loving it and thriving.
The wait was miserable, but it was all worth it. 
Yes, my son noticed that the apps have increased in his portal. But what does it mean?! Likely nothing at this point?
I think it just means they are updating things in the portal. How many does he have?
Do you mind sharing stats? I have a child applying engineering anxiously waiting!
I’m guessing nothing. I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t allow anything to “tip off” the decision making. But what do I know?
It seems like there might be two or three additional apps like eforms and student jobs? Idk. There can definitely be indicators like at other schools: PSU, UMass etc. But seems like we’re still too far out for that. We are waiting on about 4 big decisions before/on 1/31 and it’s making us all crazy.
Sure, S24 had a 3.8 UW GPA, 33 ACT, and 13 APs. As I’m sure you know, engineering, business, and computer science are more selective.
Last year a parent discovered some portal astrology indicators, but Wisconsin removed those after the EA round. I don’t think there’s really any clues on decisions to be found.
Do you think it will come out this Friday?
We have had those apps all along. Yes next two weeks are going to be crazy! Best of luck to all!!!
Interesting! I don’t even remember which apps were there and which weren’t. What were the astrology indicators last year out of curiosity?
Man, I sure hope so! The sooner the better!
No idea. I think EA came out last year on the Friday closest to the 31st. I think they released everything except wait list decisions on Fridays and all notifications came out after 5 pm Central Time.
You can check past years’ threads for Wisconsin here on CC to get a pretty accurate picture of how they operate.
Last year it seemed like Wisconsin placed the most weight on UW GPA for admitting students. Almost all EA admits on CC were 3.9+ UW GPA (with multiple AP classes where applicable), particularly for OOS applicants.
Thank’s for suggesting last year’s thread. It’s pretty entertaining even though it gives me second-hand anxiety.
Thank you and yes I know and also saw last year’s thread and have been through this cycle before. I was only asking because this year is different with the 5 Fridays. People on UMD thread are posting that UMD may be this friday (eve thoug it was thought to be 1/31) because there is a messgae in their housing portal. I was envisioning Wisconsin, UMD and Umich all on same day. He only cares about Wisconsin but just looking for any possible clues so we can be prepared and ready to open his decision as a family.
I would guess Wisconsin would intentionally not want to be on the same day as Michigan.
Do you happen to know if they recalc? My daughter has a 3.8 UW but her school does not factor electives in that and uses a A/A- scale. So she’s had high rigor and one B. Everything else A/A-. For reference Michigan recalculates using a 90-100 is an A scale. So for Michigan, she has a 3.96 UW. Bc they ask for grades in the commons app, I wonder if they do.
I’m sorry, I don’t know. I remember Michigan stating during the admissions tour that they recalculated GPAs, but I don’t remember seeing anything from Wisconsin on that topic.
We learned on tours and several info sessions that Wisconsin does not recalc; they focus more on rigor and how a student performs relative to their school and what is offered, and they are holistic in their review. The essays are also important from what we have heard.
Every school pretty much recalculates. There are many issues that go into this recalculation. Your school will actually submit information on how it grades students to help the college recalculate for example at our school a 93 is an A.
This literally was a bit of a shock to some parents I recall when my older son applied in 21-22 and many of his fellow college students were surprised when they saw his transcript one day. 'wow your school grades hard!" they said. In my son’s case I do not think they pushed his GPA down. He had a total GPA a hair below 93 which if you translated it literally from his schools student handbook meant he was a “B” student. The school also publishes no class rank to help either. I think the colleges have some sense of not only how to rebalance things but also which schools are “harder” than others both from the grading system but likely also from data they hold or acquire on the high schools themselves. This likely allows them to do more than just a straight conversion. Our school also doesn’t do honors social sciences for the first two years, and doesn’t do honors foreign language at all, and barely offers any APs open to sophomores. My first son only took one AP as a sophomore (he ended up with 7 I believe) and my second son (applying this year) couldn’t fit in any.
What I’ve learned listening to and looking at how parents/students report their GPAs up here and otherwise is that most of it is sorta b.s. I don’t know how I can compare my son’s UW GPA as I calculated it to someone’s reported weighted GPA if they’re on a 5.0 scale to begin with where A+ actually could and my kid has to hit 93 on his in class AP exams as an average to then say he has an A.
My best advice is just do a simple recalc of your GPA to a 4.0 scale (i.e. ignore the grading guidance conversion sheet from your school for letter grades and such) and don’t bump anything for AP or Honors then do the same for a 5.0 scale and bump .5 for honors and 1.0 for AP or DE. Remove the electives and anything else you think you should. That’ll be the best sort of baseline for you to use. When doing the 5.0 though consider that for me I also did one where I ONLY calculated the classes that were the honors and AP or DE because on a Weighted basis Foreign Language and those other social studies classes and such where he could not get higher rigor even if he wanted it technically were DRAGGING DOWN his Weighted GPA vs. other kids who could claim they took “honors freshman global history”.
Here’s another tidbit - we hired someone to advise us early on in the process (I fired them…) and the first thing she did was recalculate his GPA using their internal method and she made a big deal of removing all his art classes (colleges don’t weight that! she firmly told us) my kid replied in the zoom chat (he refused to do them after with her) — “but I’m applying for design.” so who do you think was right? He had taken 4 complete years or art.
The moral of the story – everything goes into a black box and trying to unpack it or compare it to others is really honestly alchemy and so best to sit back and just pull out your favorite mystical/mythical methods – my wife uses Tarot cards e.g. – I think she has a better chance of predicting things than any chance me expert here. You’ll drive yourself nuts trying to divine things otherwise.
Also fwiw older son got into Wisconsin-- he also got into Texas OOS which the aforementioned consultant told him he had no chance. He’s currently a double major there in design and sociology and has a 3.8 GPA so go figure. I have no clue what schools my kids will get into – they have decent grades, test scores they’d never share with anyone, and essays that the consultant we work with (awesome person I found after I fired the first one) called “like getting candy as a kid” when she read them.
The vast majority of public people/students here and on reddit are the 1% academic overachievers and a lot of them push out GPAs that I have no clue what they mean or not. It also seems like most of them are going for engineering or CS – as if there’s any comparison for those kids to begin with. If you have a 90+ GPA and 5-7 APs then just package it all up and apply up and down the safety to hard reach line and explain to your kid they bought lottery tickets then see what happens. BTW UNC says that after 5APs the more APs don’t matter in terms of predictiveness of college achievement. So I think it’s awesome when some kid has 13 APs, but it’s also of no comparison value tbh.
I wish everyone’s kid here the best of luck to get into Wisconsin - it’s a great school. I’ve visited it many times over the past 20 years (friends used to teach there) and I think they’ll try hard to accept your kids regardless of what quadratic integral derivative regex transformer formula possibly used to divine your student’s greatness vs. the world.