Every colleges have too many applicants for CS/ CE/ EE even though the colleges have admitted increasingly more freshmen. The class size is so ridiculously large that professors need TAs and tutors to help mark assignments and even exams, yes exams 
so better be very friendly to your TAs (as Terri suggested, date them if you’re a woman).
Maybe the list is a year off from the kids you know?
Um… lynbrook is second on the list.
Not sure why monta and cupertino are not in the list.
The opening sentence of the article is, “Vishruth dyer’s parents gathered close as their 15-year-old son opened an email with the the thrilling news: The Monta Vista High sophomore earned the rare distinction of scoring a perfect 36 on his ACT college entrance exam."
Yet the list didn’t have MVHS?
Manch, can you give me a link to where you found that?
That’s the link by catchmani79 
Mercurynews.
CUPERTINO — Vishruth Iyer’s parents gathered close as their 15-year-old son opened an email with the thrilling news: The Monta Vista High sophomore earned the rare distinction of scoring a perfect 36 on his ACT college entrance exam.
“I almost fell out of my chair,” his father, Anand, said. “It was a big congratulations. I didn’t even know what to say to him.”
But as much as he and his wife, Sucharita, hope that Vishruth’s success could catapult him into the college of his choice by the time he’s a senior, they can’t help but be skeptical. As they are learning — along with many high school seniors now receiving their final acceptance and rejection letters from some of the top-ranked schools in the country — perfection doesn’t guarantee a spot at Stanford, Princeton or even Berkeley.
“Not now, no,” said Margaret Routhe, an independent college counselor in famously-competitive Palo Alto. “If you have a 36 on your ACT and think you’re going to walk into Harvard, it’s not the case.”
As recently as five years ago, Stanford was rejecting about 69 percent of applicants with perfect SAT scores. And those scores don’t come easily. Only a fraction of 1 percent of students who take the SAT scored a perfect 1600 or, on the ACT, a composite 36 on the four subject areas. The College Board that runs the SAT didn’t provide specific numbers on perfect scores but reported that only 5 percent of test takers score above 1400.
For the ACT, only one-tenth of one percent of test takers across the country scored a 36 this year, and California is home to 421 of them. The fact that Vishruth is only a sophomore makes his achievement all the more rare. Four Bay Area high schools can claim at least a dozen top-scoring students on the ACT this year: Gunn in Palo Alto with 18, Lynbrook in San Jose with 13 and, with 12 each, Mission San Jose in Fremont and Harker School in San Jose.
Although top scores on either test are certainly special, admissions officers at elite universities are looking for something, ahem, more special. Stanford calls its admissions screening “holistic” and is searching for “intellectual vitality” and extraordinary achievements among the piles of applicants. On Friday, the university announced it accepted 4.3 percent of its undergraduate applicants this year.
There are at least a couple thousand kids with perfect ACTs or SATs all competing for slots in the same top 10 schools listed on U.S. News and World Report, said Irena Smith, who also runs an independent college counseling business in Palo Alto. “They’re getting eclipsed with someone who is an Olympic hopeful, someone with multiple patents, published authors,” she said, “and even a lot of those kids aren’t getting in.”
I don’t get why kids need to declare CS major on their application. Can’t they say they want to study math or physics and change majors after they get in? Even CS majors need to do tons of math and some physics in first year.
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Lowell high school only has 3. What’s dragonboy’s explanation? As a magnet school, it’s doing worse than many regular high school.
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Depends on the school. I thought for UCB you had to apply into a sub-school and a major.
Ok. Got it. Thanks. I want to forward to my school, but don’t want to point them to this forum.
I think It’s not hard to change majors in every US college? If not just double major math and CS. Math is a beautiful subject. 
Time has changed, very hard to change major to CS, too many monkeys 
If a kid took all the lower level required CS classes and ace every one of them I find it hard to believe they won’t allow change of major.
You can’t even get enrol in the necessary courses to declare if you are not notional cs major.
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There’s a quora thread on that topic.
Many schools like CMU don’t allow students to change their majors to CS. In case of UCB, EECS is exclusive admission to that major. For LS CS, you can declare CS major later. However, your GPA in CS courses should be over threshold (which is increasing based on demands).
If they don’t do that, i am sure 80% of students want to declare CS major and they will have serious staff/resource issue in CS classes.
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From a strategy point of view, which is better? Apply for a lower demand major and change later on? Or just go in applying for the toughest?
Stop using tricks and earn your keep honorably
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One night I had a epiphany. If you don’t follow the lanes the road is super wide.
Yes everybody please follow the “rules”.
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