Which University of Costa Rica programmes are within reach?
We compare your admission score with the 2026 ordinary-round cut-off for each of the 165 programme and campus combinations that have one — 136 sorted into safe, likely and aspirational, and 29 listed separately (special entry requirements, or places left unfilled) because their cut-off can't be read that way.
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The cut-off (nota de corte) is, in UCR's words, the minimum admission score obtained in the last place allocated for each programme and campus in 2026. Applicants are ranked by admission score and offered their first or second choice while places last, so it records one year's competition: it is not a requirement set in advance and not a prediction.
This section covers the University of Costa Rica only. Costa Rica's other public universities — the Tecnológico de Costa Rica (TEC), the Universidad Nacional (UNA), the Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED) and the Universidad Técnica Nacional (UTN) — and the private universities are not here. TEC publishes its cut-offs, on its own exam's scale, under a copyright notice with no reuse licence; UNA's open-data portal has no admission or cut-off data; we found no reusable admission data for UNED or UTN; the state universities' joint statistics (CONARE) carry a non-commercial licence; and the private-university council (CONESUP) reserves all rights to its register. UCR is the one that publishes its admission data as open data.
UCR admits on the nota de admisión (admission score) it sends every applicant who sits its Prueba de Aptitud Académica (PAA). It combines the PAA result with the average of named high-school (educación diversificada) subjects, half each, and is then standardised for that year's applicants — to a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100, with the year's best score set to 800 — so it runs from 200 to 800. Because it is re-standardised every year, a score from one year's process is only roughly comparable with another year's cut-offs. Students who sit the PAA in 2026 receive their score in November and compete for 2027 places, so they are being compared with the 2026 cut-offs — the latest published. Your answers stay in this browser. UCR's admission pages (in Spanish)
Cut-offs move from year to year — the scale itself is re-standardised each year. Across 637 pairs of consecutive years for the same programme and campus (2020–2026), the ordinary-round cut-off moved by a median of 15.0 points; three quarters moved by 32.3 or less, and one in ten by more than 67.9. So we call a score within 30 points of the 2026 cut-off, either way, “likely”, 30 or more above it “safe”, and more than 30 below it “aspirational”. Those bands are CollegeMatcher's, not UCR's.