Does senior year matter for UC Berkeley?

UUC Berkeley's own research on its admissions reads, the 2005 Hout report, shows that the senior year still counts in how an application is scored. Most families treat that year as a victory lap: the courses are chosen in the spring of junior year, the applications go out in November, and the transcript that matters looks finished by the time anyone reads it.

The study is old, but its lesson has not aged. Families who ease off once the applications are filed, or who let a hard spring slide, are often surprised by how directly those choices were measured, and by which of two grade patterns made any difference at all. The answer starts with what readers were asked to code.