GPA

What minimum GPA and test scores do I need to be admitted?

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.

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