The UC application is unlike any other. No letters of recommendation. No counselor report. No school profile. No transcript in front of the reader. No test scores. Your voice is the only voice on the page.
Filling Out the UC Application: What Families Need to Know for 2026-2027
Webinar replay and transcript. Recorded Monday, August 3, 2026.
About this session
The University of California application opened on August 1. Students cannot submit it until October 1, and the filing period closes November 30. This session covers what to do with the weeks in between.
The UC application is unlike any other application a student will fill out. There are no letters of recommendation, no counselor report, no school profile, and no transcript in front of the reader at the time an application is evaluated. There are no test scores. The student’s own words are the only account the readers get, and UC instructs its readers not to assume or infer anything that isn’t written on the page.
Rather than a tour of the form, this session is about how nine campuses actually read an application, and what that should change about the choices a student makes. It covers the 13 factors UC uses in comprehensive review, how the UC GPA is calculated and why it isn’t the number on a transcript, how to enter coursework correctly, majors and alternate majors and applying undeclared, the personal insight questions, activities and awards, the two additional comments boxes, residency, the scholarship section, and UC’s policy on AI. Rules that differ for California residents and out-of-state applicants are flagged throughout.
The audience included parents, students, independent educational consultants, and school counselors. Questions were answered throughout rather than held to the end, so the transcript follows the conversation as it happened.
The presenters
Venkates “Swami” Swaminathan is the founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr, an independent educational consulting company, and a member of NACAC and HECA. He serves on HECA’s Ad-Hoc Committee on AI in College Counseling and its College Knowledge Committee, and co-leads the HECA AI Learning Lab. He has led LifeLaunchr for more than twelve years, and before that spent his career in engineering and technology. He holds a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois.
Jennifer Turfler is a college admissions coach at LifeLaunchr with more than twenty years in education. She spent years as an academic advisor at UC San Diego, working primarily with STEM and pre-med students, and later taught high school English, including a six-week unit on the college essay. She has seen the UC process from inside a UC campus and from the counseling side.
Transcript
Getting started
Swami: Hi everyone. If you have questions about the UC application as we go, please put them in the chat or the Q&A box at the bottom of your Zoom screen. We’ll answer as many as we can along the way. The whole point of this presentation is to help people understand how this works, so please ask.
Today we’re talking about the University of California application and what families need to know. Many of you here are independent educational consultants, school counselors, parents and students, so it’s a diverse group with different backgrounds. Some of this may be material you already know. We’ll go through how the UC application works and what the point of it is, and then walk through some of the actual screens.
I’m Venkates Swaminathan, founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr. We’re an independent educational consulting company and a member of NACAC and HECA, the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the Higher Education Consultants Association. I serve on HECA’s ad hoc committee on AI in college counseling and I’m part of the College Knowledge Committee. Along with my co-leader Binay Narang, I co-lead the HECA AI Learning Lab, which helps counselors learn to use AI effectively. I’ve been running LifeLaunchr for twelve-plus years. My background before that was engineering. I have a master’s in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois and was in the tech business for a long time.
Jen, do you want to introduce yourself?
Jen: Thank you, everyone, for being here. I have some inside knowledge of the UCs. I was an academic advisor at UC San Diego for years, mostly with STEM and pre-med students. I was also an English teacher for years and taught the college essay in my classroom. I had a six-week unit, and we went through applications and essays year after year.
The basics
Swami: Let’s start with the basics.
The UC has its own application, separate from the one most other colleges in this country use. Most colleges use the Common App, which rolled over on August 1. The UC application is usually closed over the winter and reopens August 1.
One application goes to all nine UC campuses: Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Merced, UCLA, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. The campus not on that list is UC San Francisco, which is entirely a graduate school, primarily a medical school. You decide which campuses you want to apply to and submit one application.
So there’s the UC application, there’s the Common App, and then the California State Universities have their own entirely separate application, Cal State Apply, which doesn’t open until October 1.
Your voice is the only voice
Swami: One of the things that makes the UC application very different is that if you’re a student, your voice is the only one the readers see. The UCs have particular rules about how they read applications.
They will not review letters of recommendation, with a rare exception at UC Berkeley we’ll come to. No school profile. Your counselor won’t send a counselor report they’ll read. They don’t do interviews, again with rare exceptions. They don’t ask you to send a transcript when they’re deciding. You report all your coursework yourself. If you put in links to portfolios or other attachments, they will not review them. Other than those few exceptions, they will not ask follow-up questions. Some programs do require supplemental applications, and very occasionally a UC will ask a student to verify extracurricular activities, but those are the exceptions. And of course they will not look at SAT or ACT scores.
When UC trains the people who read applications, they tell them: don’t assume or infer anything that’s not in the application.
So if something is true and you need them to know it, you have to say it. They will not read the rest of your application and infer it. If you say you had a health issue, and separately your sophomore grades weren’t great, they will not draw the connection unless you draw it. Be clear about any connection you want them to make. No counselor report is going to provide that context on your behalf.
Jen: That absolutely makes sense. I’m going to put the links for dates and deadlines, and for UC San Diego’s eight colleges, in the chat.
What doesn’t factor in
Swami: It’s important to understand what does not factor into UC admissions.
After Prop 209, the UCs are forbidden from considering race or ethnicity. The readers do not know a student’s race or ethnicity. They also do not know a student’s gender. The UCs do not consider legacy. It doesn’t matter at all whether a student’s parent went to Berkeley or UCLA. They do not consider demonstrated interest, so it doesn’t matter whether you visited a campus. They don’t care about the prestige of your extracurricular activities. What matters is what you did in them. They don’t favor private schools over public schools. And they don’t consider SAT or ACT scores.
Worth pointing out: while they don’t consider the SAT or ACT, they will look at AP and IB scores. If you’ve taken AP exams, report all of them. For students on the Common App we’ll often say some AP scores are worth reporting and others aren’t. The UCs are clear: report them all. If a score helps your application, they’ll consider it. If it doesn’t, they won’t ding you for it. There’s no harm in reporting them.
Jen: I have a couple of questions on this slide. On race and ethnicity, what if a student reports that they attend temple or church, or that they’re part of a cultural club? Is it okay to add those details, or is that a problem?
Swami: It’s totally fine. If a student says their community service work was at a Hindu temple or a synagogue or a church, that’s fine. When the UC readers read your application, they see it and evaluate it as your contribution to your community, not as a statement about your religion. It doesn’t matter to them whether you’re Jewish or Hindu or Christian. Those aren’t the factors they consider.
Jen: And if I have a student who scored well on the PSAT and earned National Merit status, can I include that? I know we’re not supposed to be putting in test scores, but can we include the award?
Swami: Yes, under the activities and awards section. National Merit Semifinalist is an award, so you can include it there.
What test-blind means is this: if you have an SAT score of 1540 or 1550, there is no place on the UC application to report it. Absolutely no place. And they will not use that score in evaluating your application.
How applications get read
Swami: The UCs get a lot of applications. A couple hundred thousand students apply to UC campuses. Every application is read by two human readers, not AI. They read every application completely. They have a lot of work to do and they read fast, but they read all of it.
Two things people need to understand. First, applications are read by human beings. Second, no UC knows where else you have applied. If you apply to UC San Diego, they don’t know whether you applied to UCLA or Berkeley or Santa Cruz. They have no idea. Each campus makes its own independent decision.
People ask us this all the time, Jen. Will they say, “UCLA, you take this student, Berkeley, I’ll take that one”? There is no such thing. They make independent decisions.
Jen: I have a question that came into the chat. If you take an AP course and get a school grade but couldn’t take the College Board exam, does that affect your chances?
Swami: It depends. If you took the AP course and got a grade, report the course and report the grade. If there was a particular reason you couldn’t take the exam, that’s something you can put in the additional comments section. It’s impossible to say definitively whether it will have an impact in general.
The 13 factors
Swami: The UCs use what’s called a 13-factor process, and each campus uses it slightly differently.
Five of the factors relate to your academic record: your GPA in the UC’s A through G courses, the subjects the UCs care about, meaning social science, English, math, science and so on. Beyond that they want to see breadth and depth beyond the minimum. What honors, AP, IB and college coursework have you done? How strong is your senior year curriculum?
This comes up a lot with students who say the UCs don’t count senior year grades, so do they really need a hard senior year. You do have to show rigor and an upward trajectory, adding a little more each year, to prove you can keep up and take on challenges. Junior year should not be the peak of your academic achievement in high school. That’s the recent marked improvement factor.
Then there are four factors about achievement and talent. Outstanding performance in a subject area matters. We get questions all the time asking how many hours of community service a student needs. It isn’t the hours. It’s the difference you make, the impact, the accomplishment. Then outstanding work on special projects. Special talents, like being a violinist who has played at Carnegie Hall. Awards, skills, leadership, and special projects within your school curriculum.
The other four are context. Are you top 9 percent in your local context or in the statewide context? How did you do relative to the opportunities available to you? What did you accomplish in light of your life circumstances? Maybe you don’t have outstanding performance in a subject area, but you looked after a sibling, or you were the primary caregiver. It matters to say that on the UC application.
Jen: Can you say more about accomplishments in light of circumstances?
Swami: Life circumstances make life easier or harder for people in different ways. If you had to hold down real responsibilities, that matters. I worked with a student whose mother worked at a nail salon and whose father was severely ill and unable to work. This kid did everything in the household. Filed the tax return, ran the household, on top of going to school and getting good grades. Those accomplishments matter.
The other side is a student who goes to a good school with well-off parents and a lot available to them. They want to see that you did more with the resources you had.
Likewise with location of your school and residence. It isn’t that they favor public over private, or suburban over rural. But if you go to school somewhere with relatively few resources, they will look at your application differently, because you have had fewer things available to you in your community.
Jen: So will certain campuses look at strong grades more favorably than strong extracurriculars?
Swami: A couple of the UCs have a more quantitative approach. Merced weights academics 70 percent and non-academics 30 percent. Riverside computes an academic index score. The others view it holistically and look at everything together before making a decision. At Riverside and Merced the weighting is more transparent and less holistic. That’s the simplest way to put it.
A-G requirements
Swami: The UCs categorize coursework A through G: history, English, math, science, language other than English, visual and performing arts, and college prep elective. Those are the A through G categories, and those are the courses they care about. If you took PE or health, those usually aren’t A through G, and your grades in them make no difference to the admission decision.
You’re required to have at least 15 courses. Most admitted students have completed somewhere between 22 and 27 A through G courses. Completed means a grade of C or better. Students need to understand that while a D is a passing grade in high school, for the UCs a D is a failing grade. And while they say you need three years of math, geometry is required. You can’t go to the UCs without geometry.
Jen: I’ve posted how applications are reviewed and the A through G subject requirements in the chat.
Swami: There are some exceptions. You can be admitted by what they call admission by exception. That’s for someone who attends a school in a community where no visual and performing arts courses are offered at all. The UCs will admit them by exception in some cases. But it is very rare. For most students, please don’t count on admission by exception.
Jen: Going back to the 13 factors, how do they evaluate out-of-state candidates?
Swami: Out-of-state candidates have slightly different academic requirements, but they still use the 13 factors. They’re still evaluating each student across all those axes.
Jen: And for A through G, do they consider all courses in the GPA calculation, or just the highest-level grade in that category?
Swami: All courses.
The UC GPA
Swami: The UCs calculate GPA in an unusual way. They only look at 10th and 11th grade A through G courses. Ninth grade doesn’t count toward your GPA, and neither does senior year.
But your ninth grade and senior year courses do matter. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take hard courses in those years, and it doesn’t mean your grades in them don’t matter. It’s only the GPA calculation that uses 10th and 11th grade A through G courses. They cap honors points at eight semesters, with some exceptions. They absolutely do look at rigor.
The whole GPA question gets confusing because people think a student with a higher GPA gets in where a student with a lower GPA doesn’t. That’s the point of the 13 factors. They’re looking at all of this holistically and making a judgment about whether a student can do the work the UCs will require of them.
Jen: And they don’t count pluses and minuses. A B+, a B and a B− are all the same from the UC’s perspective.
Swami: There’s the official UC GPA calculation, and there’s a tool called RogerHub if you want to calculate your own. That said, the UCs will calculate your GPA. Please don’t obsess over it. Get better grades, take harder coursework, do well in school, and let them calculate it the way they calculate it. The things you control are the courses you take, the grades you get and the effort you put in. Focus on those.
Jen: Is the calculation logic the same for out-of-state students?
In-state and out-of-state
Swami: In-state students need a minimum UC GPA of 3.0. If your calculated UC GPA is below 3.0, you’re not eligible for admission to the University of California. For out-of-state students it’s 3.4.
For in-state students, whether a course counts as honors depends on the UC-approved course list. Go to the UCOP website, put in the name of your school, and it will list every course at that school and tell you whether it’s honors. Some courses your school calls honors are not honors in the UC system.
For out-of-state students, you only check the honors box for AP, IB and transferable college courses. Otherwise don’t check it, even if your school calls the course honors.
Either way, report the course title exactly as it appears on your transcript. And enter every course and every grade. They don’t ask for your transcript when you apply, but after you’re admitted, if you decide to attend, they will ask for it, and it’s very important that your transcript matches precisely what you said on the application.
Jen: Someone is asking about 11th grade summer courses taken at a community college. Do those count toward the 11th grade GPA?
Swami: Yes. Every course up until 12th grade starts. The window ends when the summer after 11th grade ends.
Entering your coursework
Swami: If you’re an in-state student, the most important advice is: don’t type in the names of your courses. Put in the name of your school and every course at your school should be there. Select from their list. They already know whether it’s honors. If they don’t call it honors, don’t try to change it. They’re always right.
If you’re out of state, you do have to categorize your courses yourself.
Some other important rules. List every school and every college where you took courses. Every one, please don’t leave any out. These get checked at the end of the process. If you took a course at a community college and got a poor grade, don’t skip it.
Some things students think of as colleges, like BYU Independent Study, Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, or UC Scout, sound like universities but are high schools. Put them under your high schools. If you took a course at a community college, dual enrollment always gets entered under the community college, never under your high school.
If you repeated a course, enter both attempts and let the UCs decide what to do. The Cal State application is different. There you report only the better grade. On the UC application you report both.
Some middle school courses count. Math from Algebra 1 up, and a language other than English taken in seventh or eighth grade. All other middle school courses do not count. If you took geometry before high school, as long as it appears on a high school transcript, you can put it on the UC application.
Jen: Are there extracurriculars or local awards from middle school that count?
Swami: Generally no. The UCs don’t want to know about your middle school life. If you won Math Olympiad in eighth grade, that’s awesome, but it isn’t relevant to their decision.
Jen: Another question: if courses taken at a community college through dual enrollment aren’t on the approved course list, should they be reported?
Swami: Yes. Every California community college course is also listed in the UC application. But if it isn’t there, type it in and categorize it yourself. If you took a course and got a grade, report it. If you took a course at some other university, State University of New York or the University of Texas or a community college elsewhere, report all of them.
Out-of-state students classify their own A through G. You enter a course like English literature and classify it under English. You categorize every course yourself. The UCs review it to make sure what you said makes sense, and they’ll ask for a transcript at the end of the process.
Jen: Is there a GPA calculator for out-of-state students?
Swami: The same RogerHub calculator works. Just remember that the only courses that count as honors are AP, IB or transferable college-level courses, not a course your school calls honors.
Majors, alternates and undeclared
Swami: Where major choice matters comes up all the time, along with undeclared. Berkeley and UCLA will generally only consider students for their first-choice major.
Jen: What about a student trying to get into engineering who thinks they should apply undeclared and switch in later?
Swami: At most of the UCs, undeclared can help in terms of getting in, but it will not help you get into a selective major. Please don’t apply undeclared expecting to switch into a very selective major after you show up. Majors have only so much space. That won’t work. Some campuses also have specific rules about applying undeclared.
Undeclared is not an easy way around the difficulty of admission to a selective major at a UC.
Jen: We get that question a lot from families. Undeclared is for students who genuinely want to explore. And generally undeclared still applies within a particular college. If you’re undeclared within the College of Letters and Science, your major choice will be limited to majors offered within Letters and Science. You can’t then say you want to switch to nursing.
Swami: The reference guide to UC admissions is really helpful. They call it a quick reference guide, and I don’t know why, because it is not in the least bit quick.
Jen: It’s a very detailed reference guide.
Swami: If you have questions about where major choice matters, or where undeclared is allowed, the reference guide gives you precise information and it’s worth reading. In general, gaming the UC admission system is harder than people think.
At Irvine, they review every applicant for their first choice, and then, after everyone has been reviewed, if space is available in certain majors they look at who applied to those as a second choice. The others mostly look at first choice and alternate together. At Merced, major choice isn’t really a factor in the decision.
Jen: Can a student apply for different majors at different campuses?
Swami: Absolutely, and it’s a common strategy. You apply to Berkeley for statistics and then apply to Riverside or Merced for data science, because the program is harder to get into at Berkeley, which is much more selective.
That said, your application overall has to point toward your major choice. It doesn’t work to apply to history at Berkeley and data science at Riverside. It’ll seem strange to the reader. The UCs don’t know where else you applied, so they aren’t comparing notes, but if your application doesn’t show an interest in history, don’t apply to history. It will be obvious that all your activities are in a different subject area.
Some special majors and programs, most commonly arts, music, nursing and theater, require supplemental applications and often a portfolio. You submit your UC application first, then go in and submit the supplemental application after.
The other critical thing about choosing an alternate is to go meaningfully less selective. Don’t pick mechanical engineering with an alternate of chemical engineering. If you don’t get into mechanical engineering you probably won’t get into chemical engineering either. It isn’t significantly less selective. Ideally pick a different college altogether. If you’re applying to an engineering major, apply to mathematics or statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences. If you’re applying to computer science, likewise mathematics. If nursing, then public health or global health, majors related to your interest but not as hard to get into. But pick one you’d actually enroll in. Don’t pick a major you wouldn’t want to study.
Some majors can’t be your second choice. Nursing is a good example, and engineering at Santa Barbara is first choice only. Some majors have predefined alternates. If you apply to the M.E.T. program at UC Berkeley, you’re automatically considered for an alternate major and don’t have to select one.
The personal insight questions
Swami: I’m going to quote what the UC says over and over: it is not an essay. Get to the point. Don’t write, “It was a lovely Tuesday afternoon in the fall, and the sun was shining.” They don’t want that. They want you to answer the question as if it were an interview.
The simplest way to answer is to literally ask yourself the question, record your answer on your phone, transcribe what you said, and then fix it up and add detail. Get to the point first. Answer as if it were a real interview.
Jen: This is different from the Common App essay. With the Common App essay you want narrative, showing rather than telling, descriptive imagery, figurative language, storytelling. For the UCs, it’s an interview setting.
Swami: Give them a straightforward answer, and then have some takeaway about what you learned from the experience. Don’t use quotes, dialogue, outside references or links. If you write, “I did this amazing project, here’s a YouTube link,” they will not follow the link.
AI and the application
Swami: The UCs have rules about AI.
First, they do not use AI to read your application. Human beings read it, and they train their readers extensively.
It’s okay to use AI as a tool: for brainstorming, for talking through ideas, for thinking about how your activities list should be structured. But they want you to know that submitting a fully AI-written answer on the UC PIQs is not okay. The UCs run plagiarism checkers on applications. Many AI generators use words other people wrote without attributing them, and that is a fatal flaw in an application.
Jen: A question came in about the arts requirement. Are there exceptions for out-of-state students?
Swami: Generally no. Out-of-state students applying to the UCs need an arts course, unless they’re admitted by exception, meaning they attend a school where no arts courses are offered or they had no opportunity to take one. But there’s a huge range of visual and performing arts classes. Ceramics, photography, digital art. It doesn’t have to be painting or musical theater.
Jen: Is it okay for AI to help with phrasing on the activities, to suggest action verbs?
Swami: That’s fine. At the end of the day, read through it and craft what you have. What goes on the application needs to be your words, not AI’s words. You can use AI to help you think it through, or to give you a starting point you then edit. Unlike the PIQs, it isn’t a matter of authorship. But make sure the words on your application are yours.
Activities and awards
Swami: The activities and awards section is very important. The UCs give you a lot of space: 20 entries, each with about 350 characters, sometimes 600 for the data entry. That’s about 50 words per activity, so there’s a lot you can say. Use it wisely.
You don’t have to follow any particular ordering scheme. You can order by significance, by effort, or by category and then by significance within each category. But have a system that makes sense and stick to it, so someone reading your application understands why you ordered it that way.
Jen: It’s really important to lead with impact, not with your title. Lead with what you accomplished. What comes up a lot is students writing, “I attended meetings every week.” That’s something they did, but from the UC’s perspective, what did you accomplish by attending meetings every week? Attending meetings is not an accomplishment. Your role, your responsibilities, your accomplishments, your takeaways.
Jen: What if I have more than 20 activities? Should I put those in the additional information section?
Swami: There’s no hard and fast rule, but my recommendation is almost always to pick the 20 most important things and leave the others out. Very few students have more than 20 genuinely meaningful things to put on an application. What ends up happening is padding, on the belief that more is better. It isn’t. It makes you seem like someone who couldn’t decide what to invest their time in.
Jen: And what if I only have 10 activities? I’m worried about not having 20.
Swami: Only put in 10. There’s solid psychosocial research on this. If you have a list of 10 strong things and you add one weak thing, human perception is such that our impression of all 11 is lower. We think less of the whole because of one weaker entry. Padding a list has the opposite effect from what people expect. Don’t pad your list.
Be mindful about what you really did and focus on what you accomplished. The UCs like you to be specific about numbers, timelines and outcomes. If you were one of 20 students selected for something, or you got 45 people to join your club, say so. Numbers convey impact.
And if you’re going to write about something in your PIQs, make sure the activity itself is listed on your application. If you write a whole PIQ about how much Boy Scouts meant to you but scouting isn’t on your activities list, the reader will think something isn’t adding up.
Use strong verbs: led, built, organized, launched, raised. Avoid “helped with,” “participated in,” “attended.”
Jen: It’s the same with resumes. When you apply for a job, you use strong verbs.
The additional comments boxes
Swami: There are two additional comments boxes on the UC application. One relates to your academic history and one to your extracurricular activities.
The first thing: if there’s nothing to be said, don’t say it. Don’t invent hardships to fill the box. If you leave it blank, nothing bad happens. Don’t write a PIQ here. Don’t feel compelled to fill the space. Don’t rehash your activities list.
If something genuinely needs explaining, explain it. A student who had no extracurricular activities the summer between junior and senior year because she had brain surgery that summer, that’s meaningful and someone should understand it. Or a family crisis: grades fell because a family member was seriously ill, or there were caregiving responsibilities. Those are important to explain, and you should explain them briefly and concisely.
Likewise if something about your grades needs explaining. A scheduling conflict between two classes, a health issue in a particular semester, a class you had to repeat. Be clear. But don’t list every hardship you’ve faced, and don’t turn minor hardships into crises.
Jen: I often get this one: “I had a terrible teacher in sophomore year math and ended up with a terrible grade. Should I report that?”
Swami: There are probably different points of view on this. In our experience, don’t criticize your teachers on your college application. It isn’t helpful. If you had a bad teacher, you had a bad teacher. Hopefully you did better in other classes and that shows up. Let it go.
Jen: Another one that comes up a lot: should students with IEPs or 504s, who are neurodiverse or have a learning disability, put that in the additional comments boxes? And if they do, what’s the best way to present it?
Swami: There’s no hard and fast answer. If there’s something to explain, explain it. For example, a student had a learning difference, their grades were struggling, it was diagnosed, they got help, and their grades improved. Mentioning the learning difference, the help and the improvement explains something that needs explaining.
If there isn’t anything to explain, don’t explain it. There’s no point centering your application on a diagnosis or learning difference. That doesn’t mean you should never mention it. The principle is: if there’s something that needs to be explained, without which your application wouldn’t make sense, explain it. Be concise. Don’t overshare.
Jen: I always think about framing it around strengths gained from going through it. “I’m actually a better student because I developed…” And many students genuinely are better students because they’ve had to overcome so much. You can certainly write about it in your PIQs if that’s the case. Just don’t start with the mindset that this is what your application should be built around. Focus on creating a great application, and if in that process your learning difference is a meaningful thing to write about, it’s fine to write about it.
Residency
Swami: Residency matters because there are three different sets of rules.
If you’re an American citizen or a permanent resident with a green card, and you’ve lived in California for a certain amount of time, you’re considered a resident for admission purposes.
Students with non-immigrant visas are not considered residents for admission purposes. If you’re here on an H-4 visa, or as a dependent of an H-1B or L-1 visa holder, you are considered for admission purposes as if you were an international student.
For tuition purposes, a student admitted to the UCs can be eligible to pay resident tuition even while here on a non-immigrant visa, under certain conditions. So the rules for residency and for tuition are different.
And some students are evaluated under AB 540 and California Dream Act rules, which apply to students brought into this country as children.
Answer each set of questions on its own terms and understand how the process works.
Deadlines, and after you submit
Swami: The application opened August 1. It’s due November 30. You can’t submit it until October 1. The GPA verification form matters for students who will receive the Cal Grant or California Dream Act aid, and the FAFSA also opens October 1. Make sure you submit all documents as required.
Jen: It is difficult to modify UC applications after you submit them. Not impossible, but difficult. So please get it right.
Second, if your senior schedule changes, report it to every campus you applied to as soon as it happens. Don’t wait until you’re admitted.
And remember that admission is always provisional. Complete all your courses and send final transcripts before July 1. They compare those final transcripts to what you said you did and the grades you said you got. Be certain they match.
The scholarship section
Swami: The scholarship section confuses people because they don’t understand how it works. It’s a set of check boxes, and some are obscure. Often that’s because someone at some point endowed a scholarship for students in a particular category.
Go through and check every box that might apply to you. Nothing bad will happen. If you match a scholarship, they will invite you to apply later, and you apply then.
Check every box that is credible. Don’t check random boxes that clearly don’t apply, because you won’t qualify anyway. If it says the scholarship is for students who went to school in Alameda County and you go to school in San Bernardino County, don’t check that box.
Most UC scholarships have need as at least a factor. Even merit-based scholarships like the Regents vary in the amount you receive depending on your family’s income. So check the boxes and let the UCs do what the UCs do.
Jen: A parent asks: if you win an award or competition after you submit your application, can you report it?
Swami: Yes, but it almost never makes a difference. The decision is based on what you said in the application. You can notify every campus, but it’s unlikely to change anything.
Jen: Does submitting earlier or later influence how the application is considered?
Swami: No. But I will say that nearly every year, on November 29 or 30, the UC application crashes. And it comes right after Thanksgiving. So I tell families: submit early and don’t wait until the last minute. Then you can have a good Thanksgiving instead of stressing about the UC application crashing. It’s a simple application, and if you don’t over-engineer it, it works.
Walking through the application
Swami: You start at apply.universityofcalifornia.edu. I’m not going to create an account live, because it involves personal information I don’t want to share. You put in your email address, and it asks you to verify.
This is a student’s application. Parents do not create accounts on the University of California admission system.
Use a personal email, ideally not a school address. Pick one you’ll still have after you leave school, because they’ll send email to that address after you graduate. Get the email right, because if you get it wrong there isn’t really a way to fix it.
Make sure you pick the right term. Right now students are applying for fall 2027, not fall 2026. Big difference. And most students are applying as first-year students, still in high school, not as transfer students.
Then here’s what the application looks like.
You start with personal information: name, legal name, date of birth, contact information, citizenship and residency.
Then demographics. They do ask these questions, which comes up a lot because I just said they don’t consider any of it in the admission decision. They ask anyway, only for statistical purposes. All of it is stripped out before any reader sees the application. It’s used for after-the-fact statistical reporting on how many students of different ethnicities were accepted. Race, ethnicity and gender are not considered.
If you’re a California student in a public school, you have a statewide student ID and it’s on your transcript. Put it in, because it lets them pull your data from your school easily.
If you’re an American citizen, it will ask for a Social Security number. Something that happens all the time is that students don’t know theirs. So if you’re a parent with a student applying to college, please tell them their Social Security number.
Then the residency questions. These are the admission-related residency questions. Separately, there’s a statement of legal residence, which is about tuition. Go through and answer both sets separately. They’re quite different.
Then your parents provide some information. This is another common holdup: the student is ready to submit and the parents haven’t completed their section. Parents, please sit down with your kids and finish this early. There’s almost nothing here that takes more than five minutes.
They do ask about family income, and it isn’t a trick question. That answer is used only to determine whether you’re eligible for a fee waiver. Unless you think you’re eligible, approximate your income and put it in. They cross-check later against the FAFSA.
Then you choose your campuses, and then the majors you want at each campus. You choose the major and the alternate major, and then you enter your academic history.
You start with seventh or eighth grade math. If you took Algebra 1 for a full year in seventh grade, you put that in, and the same for a language other than English. If you went to school outside the US, you say yes there, otherwise no.
Then you enter every high school you attended. You do it by state, which is sometimes a little complicated. You have to know that BYU is in Utah, for instance. So you’d select Utah, search “Brigham,” and find Brigham Young University Independent Study High School. The search is a little clunky, but once you find it you answer a set of questions: when you started, when you stopped, whether it fits certain categories, what the grading system is, whether it’s one grade or two per semester. You can check multiple options. And whether this is the school you’ll graduate from. Go through and enter every high school.
Then you enter all your grades. Every course is listed. You select the course and enter your grades. Whether it’s an honors course is already classified, so you don’t have to make that choice.
Then you enter every college you attended. If you took a summer class at Las Positas, for example, you enter when you attended, say June 2026 to August 2026, the term system, that you were in 11th grade, and the grading scale. Then you add your college courses. For a California community college, every class is listed, so you select the class and the grades, then categorize it under A through G. If you don’t see your course, you can type it in.
It’s painstaking work, but it’s important.
Then you enter additional information relating to your academics. If any semesters aren’t filled in, you confirm you have no courses to report for them.
Then test scores: AP exams, IB exams, English language proficiency tests. This trips students up, because you can enter SAT results here, but that only applies to students using the SAT to demonstrate English proficiency. Students applying from within the United States do not enter SAT results. Then international exams, like UK A-levels or the Indian Central Board of Secondary Education exams.
Then activities and awards. One thing that makes the UC application challenging is that you can’t reorder activities after you enter them. So work separately, create your list, edit it, get the order right, and then copy and paste your answers in the correct order.
Then the scholarship section, where you go through and select the boxes that apply. The support programs are primarily for students from educationally disadvantaged and low-income backgrounds, and for first-generation college students. Worth pointing out that first generation here means the first generation in your family to go to college, not the first generation to go to college in the United States.
Then your personal insight questions, and whatever additional comments go with them. Then you review and submit.
It really is a simple application to submit. All the work is in understanding the things we just went over and getting everything prepared before you put it in.
Closing questions
Jen: For the additional information section, can you talk about achievements like getting an A+ in a class or in a dual enrollment course? Since the UCs don’t distinguish A+, A and A−.
Swami: I understand the question. You worked hard and got an A+ or a very high score, can you say so? Unfortunately they won’t consider it, so it won’t help. What they’re looking for is things that contextualize your work, not that kind of detail.
Jen: Someone understands that all coursework needs to be reported, including from their own high school and from BYU. But if there are courses with the same title and content, such as chemistry, how is the UC GPA calculated? Do they take the higher grade, the lower grade, or both?
Swami: It depends on the grades and the courses. The most common case is a student who failed a course the first time, getting a D or an F. If you took it again and got a better grade, the UCs will ignore the D or F. If you took a course twice and passed both times with a C or better, they will consider both grades, which amounts to something like averaging them.
Jen: A parent says their daughter’s transcript GPA is 4.3. What will the UC see?
Swami: You report your courses and grades, and they calculate their GPA and see what they see. You can use the RogerHub link to try to calculate it, but honestly it isn’t that helpful. Knowing what they’ll see doesn’t help you, because you can’t change it.
Jen: If a school labels a course honors but the UCs don’t, should I put it in anyway?
Swami: No. If the UCs don’t call it honors, don’t call it honors. They’re always right about that. They have their system. I know it can feel frustrating: “I took an honors course, shouldn’t I get credit? I did more than was required. Someone else got an A and didn’t do half the work I did.” But that’s how they make their decisions.
Jen: Should a student really report an AP score of 2?
Swami: Yes.
Jen: Another question: should I list and include a transcript for ninth grade from a middle school, and a repeated ninth grade transcript from the high school I’m graduating from? So ninth grade twice, at different schools.
Swami: Yes, you should report all your coursework. If you did ninth grade twice, report it twice. That’s an unusual circumstance and I’m not certain of my advice, so you can always email the UC application system and ask. But I’m reasonably confident that’s the answer they’d give.
Jen: A parent is wondering whether their child, who had health issues one year, should discuss it in the additional information, or whether that sounds like an excuse for lower grades.
Swami: If a health issue affected their grades, please mention it. That’s why the section exists.
Jen: That’s the whole point. It provides valuable context: “I had a serious health issue and my grades suffered one semester.” Absolutely mention it. But if the health issue is ongoing and hasn’t been dealt with, remember the UCs might wonder whether the student will be able to do well in college. That’s always the dilemma. If you had a health issue, your grades suffered, and you dealt with it and your grades improved, absolutely mention it. If you’re still dealing with it, it’s more complicated, because they’ll ask what happens when the student arrives on campus.
Jen: A parent is concerned that being out of state puts them at a disadvantage.
Swami: Out-of-state applicants used to have an advantage in the UC system. Then a couple of years ago the California State Legislature passed rules requiring the UCs to increase the number of in-state students. So it’s probably a little harder now for out-of-state applicants.
That said, we have lots of out-of-state students who get in and attend UCs every year. It’s a relatively common situation. The big difference is cost. The UCs are considerably more expensive for out-of-state students, and financial assistance is reserved primarily for in-state applicants.
Jen: Can parents get access to the Common Application webinar?
Swami: Yes. We sent out an email about it, and it’s on the LifeLaunchr website. Go to LifeLaunchr and look under Webinars, and you’ll find the replay with the transcript.
Swami: Jen, thank you so much for doing this with me, and thank you all for being here. If you have other questions, please ask. We’ll follow up with the replay.
Jen: Thank you, everyone.
Resources mentioned
Dates and deadlines https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/how-to-apply/applying-as-a-first-year/dates-and-deadlines.html
A-G subject requirements https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/first-year-requirements/subject-requirement-a-g.html
A-G course list (search your school; UC-approved honors courses are starred) https://hs-articulation.ucop.edu/agcourselist
GPA requirement https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/first-year-requirements/gpa-requirement.html
RogerHub UC GPA calculator (unofficial; a sanity check, not an authority) https://rogerhub.com/gpa-calculator-uc/
How applications are reviewed, including the 13 factors https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/how-to-apply/applying-as-a-first-year/how-applications-are-reviewed.html
Personal insight questions https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/how-to-apply/applying-as-a-first-year/personal-insight-questions.html
AP exam credits https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/ap-exam-credits/ap-credits/
How UC evaluates applications, including its AI policy https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/how-the-university-of-california-evaluates-student-applications
Quick Reference Guide to UC Admissions (detailed campus-by-campus policies) https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/_files/documents/quick-reference-guide-to-uc-admissions.pdf
UC Berkeley first-year policies, including the letters of recommendation process https://admissions.berkeley.edu/apply-to-berkeley/first-year-applicants-uc-berkeley/first-year-policy-changes/
UC San Diego’s eight undergraduate colleges https://admissions.ucsd.edu/why/colleges/index.html
The application itself https://apply.universityofcalifornia.edu
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
0 Comments