The 2027 Fall Freshman application will be available shortly, and I wanted to go over two big changes for the upcoming admissions season.
- You might have already seen this, but we have done away with the UGA supplemental essay question. Every year, we try and review our admissions process, and we hope to find ways to make the process better for both the applicant and our admissions team. When we first announced this, the immediate reaction on a number of social media sites was that we were doing this to grow our application fee numbers and decrease our admit rate. Just so everyone knows, the UGA Admissions Office does not get the application fee funds, and while the admit rate is exciting for some people to share/look at, it is not a driving point for our office (and no, it does not impact rankings). The reality is that we wanted to simplify the application process for the student/family, take a little stress off the process, and make life a little better for our application review team. Over the last few years, we have looked at our review process and the information we get from reading one versus two essays. We felt that the second essay did not give us much beyond what the Common App prompts essay gave us, and as such we decided to remove it. The review process will stay the same, but with our focus on writing strengths coming from just the one essay. If you believe one of your real strengths is writing, this should not hinder you, and it now gives you more time to work on the essay we will review. As well, by the end of our review process, we have a lot of tired eyes and exhausted counselors, and anything I can do to help our team focus and get through the review stage is a bonus. So good luck writing the one essay instead of two!
- For students who attend high school in Georgia, we have some more exciting news to simplify the admissions process. The UGA Admissions team has been working hard since Spring building the process of importing electronic transcript data into our admissions system. It has been a wild and sometimes frustrating challenge, but I am glad to say that the UGA Admissions IT team has done it! For Georgia HS students, you will now send us an official GAfutures transcript instead of self-reporting your high school grades on the application. I am guessing there is also a great deal of cheering from the GA high school counselors across the state as well, as they will not have to help with self reported grades. Electronic/XML transcripts really only work if there is a consistent framework for exact courses and grades to be imported, and our tech team has spent months working with the GAfutures tech team making sure the coursework and academic data are mapped correctly. Just so everyone knows, the GAfutures transcript is the document that is also sent to the GA Student Finance Commission for awarding the HOPE and Zell Miller scholarships, so all GA students need to be aware of this document for later. We actually receive a number of these transcripts already for freshman applicants, so hopefully this process will be fairly easy for everyone. This new process will allow for more accurate data, less hand calculations by the applicant and our evaluation team, and will help us avoid bottlenecks in our process. As well, this will help the UGA Admissions Office keep on track with our timelines and decision release dates, even as we grow in application numbers. We suggest that rising seniors from Georgia who plan to apply to UGA this year go ahead and have their GAfutures transcript sent to UGA’s Admission Office. Sadly, we are not able to do this with non GA schools/applicants, as the data is just not there. For students in GA who are not able to submit a GAfutures transcript (for example home school students), we will have a way to indicate this on the application. More information on how to send transcripts through GAfutures can be found here.
I hope this news helps with preparing for the application process, and Go Dawgs!