We generally give credit for scores of 4 or 5 on AP exams and 5, 6, or 7 on Higher Level IB exams. There are some exceptions to this and practices can vary from one school to another. The Undergraduate Record has specific information about AP and IB credit.
We do not have a preference for one type of course. We suggest that students take advantage of advanced course options at their high school, regardless of the type of curriculum available.
While prospective students are welcome to visit for an information session and tour, we do not offer interviews.
The laws governing domiciliary status - that is, whether a person is considered a legal resident of Virginia - are set by the state legislature. If students wish to be considered legal residents for the purposes of admission and tuition, they must answer the residency questions on our application. For more information, please see the Office of Virginia Status website.
We are test optional for the Fall 2024 and Fall 2025 cycles and have no preference between the SAT and ACT.
No. When we read your application, we will not use previous contact as a factor in our review.
Any applicant who has an historical family connection to UVA (i.e. child of a UVA graduate, child of a faculty member, descendant of an enslaved laborer, etc.) is invited to share information on their connection to the University in an optional question on the Common Application.
We have pledged to maintain a 2/3 majority of Virginia residents in our student population, but 2/3 of our applicants tend to come from out-of-state. As a result, our offer rate for Virginia residents tends to be much higher than the rate for out-of-state students. Last year, we admitted 28% of the Virginia residents and 17% of the non-Virginians. You can see data from previous years on the Office of Institutional Assessment website.
No. While we maintain a 2/3 majority of Virginia residents in our student population, there are no restrictions on how many students we may admit from a particular school, town, county, or region.
We don't have a minimum GPA. We don't have a minimum SAT score.
As strange as these answers sound, they're both true. A cumulative GPA only reveals so much; it says little about the difficulty of a student's course load, or whether a student's grades have improved over time, or the level of grade inflation (or deflation) in a student's school. If we established a firm minimum GPA, a point below which no applicant would have any chance of being admitted, we'd miss a fair number of students who might make UVA a better, stronger place.
The same is true for SAT scores. Most people who work in admission at highly selective universities believe that standardized testing is a useful but imprecise instrument. Setting an absolute minimum would be asking these tests to do something they weren't designed to do.
Of course, our applicant pool is broad and deep, so most admitted students have excelled in school and scored well on the SAT or ACT (see our Profile for more information). But remember that we don't have set minimums for either and we try hard to take into account all of the information we see in each application.
