Which is better? Most rigorous or higher GPA?

Data10
Thu, 28 Nov 2019 19:29:16 +0000

theloniusmonk:

Again, I never said they didn’t use holistic recall - my comment above that

The comment I replied to is quoted in my earlier post, which said

“on the balance, UCs do not use holistic admissions.”

If you instead mean they primarily use holistic to weed out kids who make it past initial stats, a similar statement could be made about many other highly selective colleges with holistic admissions. For example, the Harvard lawsuit review also didn’t show many 3.5 UW kids being accepted. Instead it found that if you weren’t an athlete, rejection was almost certain for applicants with a 4 or worse academic rating, and 4 or worse academic rating was very well correlated with stats alone.

theloniusmonk:

“22. 3.78 UW GPA, 4.5 W GPA, 1.5 Read score
25. 3.9 UW GPA, 4.54 W GPA, 3 Read score”

Ok but both of those were admitted.

Had they both applied to one of the more selective program like engineering, the admit rate by read scores were as follows. There are substantial differences between these read scores. A 1.5 read score is in the top ~5% of applicants and is a near certain admit to almost any program (at time of study). A 3 read score is borderline and may or many not be admitted, depending on which program they apply to.

1.5 read score – 100% admit rate
3 read score – 21% admit rate
3.25 read score – 0% admit rate

theloniusmonk:

"I"m not really sure how useful this study is as they don’t analyze the kids with 3.9 who have a 4.0 or 4.1 weighted.

It’s not that they don’t analyze this group. It’s that this group appears to be non-existent in the example class, and is likely extremely rare among overall applicants. We can see from the earlier linked tables that the few applicants who took less than 5 honors class had an abysmal admit rate of ~3% (<3% for UCLA, >3% for Berkeley). I expect 0 honors classes would be even lower (if such classes are available). We can also see that a 4.0 UW with no honors courses would lead to a UC GPA that is far below the 25th percentile range for admitted students. As such, my guess is that students who took no honors classes in spite of having them readily available in their HS would be at a strong disadvantage for admission, regardless of UW GPA. I expect you need both excellent grades and rigor (if offered at HS), rather than just one or other. However, there is a clearly a diminishing returns to increased rigor, as spelled out in the UC GPA calculation formula that caps the maximum number of honors/AP/IB courses that increase UC GPA.

The report lists specific regression coefficients for different GPA characteristics. The following GPA-related characteristics are ordered from most to least statistically significant in getting a good (lower) reader score. All of these factors could be considered important, although grades was the most influential factor. If you don’t have near a 4.0 UW, you are probably going to be rejected from a highly selective UC campus. However, if you have a near 4.0 UW without any of the other important GPA related factors, such as rigor, I expect you are also probably going to be rejected from a highly selective UC. This is consistent with the vast majority of applicants with a 3.94+ UW being rejected in the more recent freshman profiles.

High school grades
Perfect 4.0 GPA
Number of APs with high scores
Difficulty of senior classes
College prep coursework
Grades do not trend down