Which Penn undergraduate school should you apply to?

PPenn's admissions office reads every application through one of four undergraduate schools, the College of Arts and Sciences, Penn Engineering, the School of Nursing and the Wharton School, and it says it asks of each transcript whether grades in core subjects show readiness for that school specifically. The choice is made on a single line of the application, and it shapes how the whole file is read, from the senior schedule to the short essay that follows it.

Families tend to treat the four schools as interchangeable doors into one university. They are not, and Penn says so in writing. Each school has published what it looks for in plain sentences, and most applicants never read those lines closely enough to see what they ask of a transcript.