> If anybody from Texas has a different perspective on UT admission policy (I am sure it has its pathological edge cases) then I would be curious to hear.
Texan here. I'll share my story, at risk of coming across as big headed: I feel the 7% percent policy unfairly shut me out of a "better" school. I can't tell if it negatively or positively impacted my career. It either allowed me to focus more on becoming a better programmer (going to an easier school); or it made me lag in my career 1-2 years (not being able to go from a top school directly into FAANG/a SV startup).
For my first 1-2 years of HS, I had a somewhat challenging personal life and didn't take any advanced courses. It wasn't until the 3rd year I stepped up in every way possible, taking all AP courses, and getting 4-5s in 8 AP tests by graduation. I don't recall what my GPA was, but thanks to my false start it didn't meet the threshold, and I attribute being not accepted to UT to the fewer spots available due to the 7% rule.
( an aside, I'm still baffled at how this happened. By all accounts I was overqualified: won a regional UIL CS championship, had multiple gaming projects, knew multiple programming languages. There's a larger critique here about how the hell colleges determine admissions. I assume the quantitative, filterable metrics like GPA precluded anyone of importance from reading any of my qualitative attributes )
GPA is something you can game, and people in my school did. For example, the two highest level math courses you can take in HS is Calculus AB and Calculus BC–the former covers half a year of college-level math, and the latter covers a full year, both over the course of senior year. I chose BC due to an interest in math. Many others chose AB simply because they would both be weighted the same in GPA calculations, and clearly AB would be easier. The result is that the BC class had a dozen students and AB had 30. By informal surveying, the highest ranking students in the graduating class took AB, not BC. This is just one example: there are other ways a students can reduce how much they learn in favor of a higher GPA. I absolutely do not regret taking BC, it was the best part of my HS education. It's a shame it possibly harmed my college admissions.
In the end, I was rejected from my first choice (UT Austin), was accepted to University of Houston on a half-free ride, but was very disillusioned with the quality of their CS program during my entire tenure. I landed in a subpar job right out of college, and after a year at a software consulting firm for the oil industry I managed to get myself to Silicon Valley (after throwing a hail mary and moving to Seattle without a job–and then using a connection to a friend I met in Calculus BC to get a referral at a startup), where my career really started. In hindsight it was just a year or two, and perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but I think the admissions process at UT really failed to identify me as a worthy entrant, and I think the 7% rule exacerbated this. I used to be salty about this (in college / in my subpar job), but now I don't give it any thought.
I count myself lucky because, like many in this field, I was motivated to develop my programming skills outside school. Perhaps going to a weaker CS college allowed me to focus more on skills more relevant to software engineering (I even had time to consult in college).
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btw, UT Austin has a unique provision in the Texas law that reduces the 10% requirement to slightly less, hence my usage of 7%. See https://news.utexas.edu/key-issues/top-10-percent-law/