UVa admission stats

sv3a
Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:41:00 +0000

Yes, they are hard facts, but they don’t tell you what it takes to get in. That was the point of that. I’m assuming you’re a high schooler or a first year, because when I was still in HS I also thought that using things like the CDS would be pretty much the way to go, especially over the ‘opinions’ of people who post on this board. However, after spending a couple of years on this general topic of admissions, you come to realize that the admissions officers are quite smart, and you really learn very little by reading from raw data since they’ve masked admissions well. The low transparency regarding the numbers it takes to get in is fairly essential, in their view, mainly due to the problems it would create if everyone derived a definitive preconceived notion about the GPA, Rank, SAT, etc that they need to get into UVA or other schools. The adcoms don’t want you to know the “hard facts that show what it takes to get in”, so why would they even think about the CDS as a admissions tool for applicants? That’s how they fool you into thinking your GPA is ‘very important’, because we both know that makes no sense since they are publishing weighted GPAs (which obviously vary from ridiculously high weight to no weight at all depending where you are form) in the CDS which have no bearing at all on anything but your class rank.

I fully understand you wanting to take the more sensible view, and why you think it is funny (it is pretty ridiculous), but, like I said, you can only gain a very limited amount of information from that. Any sort of rationalization you perform on that data set is essentially wasted time. If you continue to stick around and view chances/acceptances threads for a couple years, you’ll see what I mean. Experience is the best thing to possess regarding this topic, and that’s why I said it was better to review old chances threads, as long as you are able to sort out the good info (experienced) from the bad. This goes for many other schools, not just UVA.