UC school score threshold

Hi @Gygy,

Thanks for your question.

The UC Schools use something called the Statewide Academic Index to determine eligibility for auto-admits into the UC system.

So if you score in the top 9% of the Statewide academic index which includes your A-G coursework and your UC GPA. They count your total number of UC-approved A-G courses completed and in progress/planned in 9th-12th grade and calculate your UC GPA using the A-G courses you completed between the summer following 9th grade and the summer following 11th grade. If your total number of A-G courses is equal to or greater than the number of A-G courses listed in the index for your GPA, then you’re in the top 9%

This doesn't mean you get into UCB or UCLA automatically, but it means that you will be guaranteed a space at a UC campus, which one, only they know.

On the opposite end of the admission criteria are minimum UC GPA requirements. UC will continue to review all applicants who earn a minimum GPA in A-G and college-preparatory courses for residents (3.0 GPA) and nonresidents (3.4 GPA). So what this means is that if your UC GPA is below 3.0 for a CA resident or below 3.4 for a non-resident, you probably will not be considered for admission to a UC college.

So, yes they have a UC GPA range to be considered for admissions to a UC college. For CA residents it is a UC GPA between 3.0 and 4.0 and for non-residents, it is 3.4.-4.0.

Maybe having these cutoffs is sensible because each year the UC system keeps getting more and more applications. In the last cycle, they got 211,000 applications, and 125,597 were accepted, and probably only 30,000 actually enrolled because UCB/UCLA has the highest yield rates at 40%/44% but the other campuses have like 10% to 20% yield rates. I'm just guessing that the avg. the yield rate for all 9 campuses is like 23%-24%.

If you think about the UC system is really not doing a great job matching up applicants to their colleges because a 23% yield is frankly bad. If you compare that to the Ivies, the avg. yield is like 73% or something like that. What this tells me is that a lot of people try to game the UC system so they have multiple safety and target schools without taking any downside risk. It would be better for the UC system to limit the number of schools you can apply to within the system to 3 or 4. That way a really top student will only apply to UCB/UCLA and 2 others, while a highly competitive student might focus on UCSD, UCI, USB, and so forth. This would mean that the UC college admissions committees would have better pools of applicants, higher yields, and be able to spend more time evaluating applicants holistically. For example, spending 15 minutes per applicant instead of 7 minutes.

If I ran the UC system, I'd publish very detailed admit data including UCGPAs and test scores for each of the schools so applicants will know which ones they stand a good chance of getting into. I would abolish the whole 9% rule and just let students self-select into the schools they want to get into.

When you guarantee that 9% of the CA applicants are auto-admit, then you just lower the yield rates because those students may really not want to go there anyway but know they have an auto-safety school. They are really hoping to get into an Ivy, Stanford, UChicago, Duke, JHU, NYU, or somewhere more prestigious.

Just my 2 cents.

Good luck.