By Glyn Caddell, BSME · Author of Digital SAT Math Secrets · Tutoring since 2008 — Updated October 22, 2026
One Hawaii university, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, holds ABET-accredited engineering degrees, and this page lists what it costs and the SAT scores of the students it admits.
UH Manoa places engineering students into Calculus I from an SAT Math of 730, and the top quarter of the students it admits scored 640, so nearly every one of them takes the university’s placement exam instead. How that works is covered below. Because the state has one engineering school and no neighbor, the second half of the page is the mainland, and what a Hawaii student pays to study there.
Table of Contents
- What Does the University of Hawaii’s Engineering College Admit and Cost?
- What SAT Math Score Puts You in Calculus at the University of Hawaii?
- Why Is the University of Hawaii at Manoa the Only Engineering School on This Page?
- What If You Want an Engineering School on the Mainland?
What Does the University of Hawaii's Engineering College Admit and Cost?
The University of Hawaii at Manoa’s College of Engineering in Honolulu admits students with a middle-50% SAT Reading & Writing of 548 to 653 and Math of 533 to 640, at a cost of attendance of $26,433 for a Hawaii resident.
The top quarter of admitted students scored at or above 653 on Reading & Writing and 640 on Math. The ACT composite range is 17 to 25, with ACT Math at 16 to 22. Tuition and fees are $12,186 in-state and $34,218 out-of-state, so an out-of-state student’s cost of attendance comes to approximately $48,500 once the higher tuition is substituted. UH Manoa has 15,029 undergraduates and admits 87% of applicants.
The College of Engineering holds five ABET-accredited degrees: civil, computer, construction, electrical and mechanical engineering. A sixth accredited engineering degree, biological engineering, sits in the university’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience.
| University of Hawaii at Manoa | |
|---|---|
| SAT Reading & Writing, middle 50% | 548 to 653 |
| SAT Math, middle 50% | 533 to 640 |
| ACT composite, middle 50% | 17 to 25 |
| ACT Math, middle 50% | 16 to 22 |
| Cost of attendance, in-state | $26,433 |
| Tuition and fees, in-state / out-of-state | $12,186 / $34,218 |
| Undergraduates | 15,029 |
| Admit rate | 87% |
| ABET-accredited engineering degrees | 6 |
Each range covers the middle 50% of admitted students who submitted that test. A quarter scored below the lower number, and the top quarter scored at or above the upper one. Figures are university-wide, from the 2025-26 College Scorecard.
Two things about those figures are worth pausing on.
UH Manoa’s Reading & Writing range sits above its Math range at both ends, by 15 points at the floor and 13 at the ceiling. The engineering college draws from a class whose reading scores run ahead of its math scores, and the placement rule in the next section is written for that class.
UH Manoa admits 87% of applicants, and admission is not the gate that matters. The gate is the one every admitted engineering student meets in his first week, and the number attached to it is above the whole admitted range.
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What SAT Math Score Puts You in Calculus at the University of Hawaii?
An SAT Math of 730 or an ACT Math of 31 places an incoming student into MATH 241, Calculus I, at UH Manoa without a placement exam, and the students it admits scored 533 to 640 on SAT Math and 16 to 22 on ACT Math.
The College of Engineering’s handbook gives four routes into a first math course: an AP exam score, an SAT Math or ACT Math score, prior college credit in precalculus or calculus, or the university’s own math placement exam. The handbook adds that students cannot register for the first math course based on high school math course grades. The score tables are short. An SAT Math of 730 or higher places into MATH 241, and 760 or higher into MATH 251A, Accelerated Calculus I, or 241. An ACT Math of 31 or higher places into 241, and 33 or higher into 251A or 241. AP Calculus AB at 3 places into 241.
| Route | Places into MATH 241 Calculus I | Places into MATH 251A or 241 |
|---|---|---|
| SAT Math | 730 or higher | 760 or higher |
| ACT Math | 31 or higher | 33 or higher |
| UH Manoa placement exam | score of 3 | score of 4 |
| AP Calculus AB | 3 or higher |
From the College of Engineering’s 2025-26 Undergraduate Handbook. A placement exam score of 1 or 2 places into MATH 140X Precalculus, and a 0 into MATH 134. Students with scores below the SAT and ACT lines take the placement exam.
Set the two tables against each other. The SAT line is 730, and the top quarter of admitted students scored at or above 640, so the line is 90 points above the 75th percentile. The ACT line is 31 against a 75th percentile of 22, nine points above it. No student inside UH Manoa’s middle 50% on either test places into calculus from his score. Every one of them takes the placement exam or arrives with AP credit.
Take a student with a 640 SAT Math. He is in the top quarter of admitted students at UH Manoa and 90 points below the score that would put him in Calculus I without an exam. He takes the exam. A 3 puts him where a 730 would have. A 2 puts him in MATH 140X, Precalculus, a semester behind the engineering sequence, and the handbook says plainly that a student who places into a lower math course takes longer to declare his major and longer to graduate. The handbook also warns against MATH 215, Applied Calculus, which does not count toward the engineering degree.
The image above shows a line 90 points above the top quarter, and an exam that gets there without them.
The exam is the real door. The 730 is a bypass, and the handbook’s table is a list of ways to skip the exam rather than a requirement to meet. A student who has done a precalculus course well can score a 3, and for a student at 640 the summer before college is better spent preparing for that exam than chasing 90 points on one section of the SAT. For a student at 700 the arithmetic is different, and 30 points on the Math section is the kind of gap that closes in weeks. The method is on our page on how to improve your SAT Math score.
There is a second gate after placement. UH Manoa admits engineering applicants first to Pre-Engineering, and a student declares civil, electrical or any other major after completing the lower-division sequence with a 3.0 UHM GPA. The catalog says the college screens on aptitude tests and high school records and that a high school applicant should have completed trigonometry, physics and chemistry and be ready for calculus on arrival. So the score is read for admission if submitted, decides placement only for the student above 730, and does nothing for the declaration.
Families who have read the 730 line frequently ask whether it is a requirement.
Is 730 Required to Study Engineering at the University of Hawaii?
A 730 is not required to study engineering at the University of Hawaii. It bypasses the placement exam, and a score of 3 on that exam places a student into the same Calculus I course.
UH Manoa admits 87% of applicants and does not require a test score for admission, so for most students the SAT decides neither whether they get in nor where they start in math. It decides placement only for the student who is already above 730, and that student is above the whole admitted range.
That is the one engineering school in the state, and the next section says why.
Why Is the University of Hawaii at Manoa the Only Engineering School on This Page?
The University of Hawaii at Manoa is the only institution in Hawaii that holds an ABET-accredited engineering bachelor’s degree.
The state’s other four-year institutions report scores and hold no engineering degree. UH Hilo admits 61% with a Math range of 455 to 565 at $21,173, and UH West Oahu admits 95% with a Math range of 458 to 528 at $18,410. Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu admits 86% with a Math range of 488 to 590 at $50,674. Chaminade University of Honolulu admits 91% with a Math range of 480 to 625 at $45,798. Brigham Young University-Hawaii in Laie admits 47% with a Math range of 480 to 570 at $25,098, with tuition of $6,630 for all students. The University of Hawaii’s community colleges on Oahu, Maui, Kauai and the island of Hawaii feed the Manoa engineering college through transfer, and a transfer applicant needs MATH 241 and 242, the first physics and chemistry sequences and a 3.0 GPA to enter the college directly.
Accreditation is the criterion for a reason that is easy to miss at seventeen. Licensure as a professional engineer normally requires a degree from an ABET-accredited engineering program, and a page about engineering colleges that listed programs without one would be listing a different thing.
So a Hawaii engineering applicant has one in-state option, and 2,400 miles of ocean between it and the next one.
What If You Want an Engineering School on the Mainland?
Most Hawaii engineering applicants apply to at least one mainland school, and there the SAT is read the way each state reads it. On the West Coast alone that is three different ways.
California’s public universities do not read a score at all, and our page on engineering colleges in California lists its public engineering campuses by admit rate for that reason. Washington, Oregon and Arizona read a submitted score against a published range, and their pages are linked below. For a Hawaii student the score’s job in-state is the 730 bypass that few will reach, and its job on the mainland is every range on those pages.
The cost runs both ways. Hawaii is a member of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, so through the Western Undergraduate Exchange a Hawaii resident pays approximately 150% of resident tuition rather than the full out-of-state rate at participating universities across fifteen western states, though the discount is program-specific and engineering is among the programs the large flagships most often cap or exclude, so a student checks the program on the WICHE site before counting on it. The exchange runs the other way too: a resident of another WICHE state pays the exchange rate at UH Manoa rather than the full $34,218, approximately $18,300 at 150% of resident tuition. A New York student gets neither discount, and his number at Manoa is $34,218.
The image above shows three students, three tuitions, one campus.
The first step for any mainland application is finding out where the score actually is, section by section. A free diagnostic SAT gives a Math and a Reading & Writing score that can be set against the ranges on the state pages linked below.
The Math section rewards the same handful of topics on every test date, and a student who knows which of them he is missing can close a gap of 50 to 100 points in weeks rather than months. The method is on our page on improving your SAT score, and the precalculus topics in it are the ones UH Manoa’s placement exam asks about.
How to Read These Score Ranges
The range on this page covers the middle 50% of admitted students who submitted the SAT, with the lower number at the 25th percentile and the upper at the 75th, so a quarter of admitted students scored at or above it.
The 730 is a different kind of number. It is not a percentile of anyone. It is the score at which the mathematics department will place a student into calculus without seeing him take its exam, and it can sit above an entire admitted range, as it does here, without saying anything about who gets in.
Because most colleges are now test-optional, the ranges that are published describe only the students who chose to submit at all. Students with strong scores submit and students with weak ones don’t, so a published range sits higher than the range for everyone who was actually admitted. More on what SAT score you need for college and on test-optional colleges.
Should You Take the ACT Instead?
UH Manoa accepts either test, reports both, and sets its calculus bypass at 730 on the SAT and 31 on the ACT.
Hawaii does not administer either test to every public high school student, so a Hawaii applicant chooses. A student should take whichever he scores higher on, and should know that neither bypass line is within the admitted range, so the choice of test does not change whether he takes the placement exam.
Engineering Programs in Nearby States
Hawaii borders no state, and California, Washington and Oregon are the usual mainland destinations for Hawaii engineering students.
See engineering colleges in California, engineering colleges in Washington, and engineering colleges in Oregon.
Engineering Colleges in Other States
We publish the same breakdown for engineering programs in every state.
See engineering colleges by state for the full list.
Glyn Caddell
Glyn Caddell holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from NJIT and has been tutoring New York City students since 2008. He founded Caddell Prep in 2012 and is the author of Digital SAT Math Secrets: Lessons & Tricks to Quickly Improve to a Perfect 800 on the Math Test, which contains over 900 practice problems and is used in Caddell Prep’s SAT math classes. He is founding president of the Staten Island Technical High School alumni association and teaches every lesson on this site personally.
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