<p>I can’t say much about this one at all, but I may offer a bit of perspective on your disparity. You see I am in a similar boat, I’m not URM but I have a 3.6 GPA with 2300 SAT. Just blindly looking at statistics is of little use, your score and GPA can’t really be considered as two separate things that occur independently. I’ve come to realize that this whole “High SAT, low GPA” kind of applicant is relatively rare anyway. </p>
<p>I’ve seen four years of national merit finalists in my school. That makes for about 40 or so, plus I know of six juniors who’re bound to become finalists next year. Of those people, only two, yes two had low GPA. One had a 3.0, another had a 3.5 with some cheating violations. The rest had 3.8+. I know everyone in my grade who is a semifinalist, and I’m the only one with a 3.6 even, the rest have 3.95ish. You see, unsurprisingly (but for some reason often overlooked) SAT scores and GPA tend to correlate. There may be tons of 4.0s getting sub 2000, yes, but there’re few 2200+s getting 3.3s. Usually “High SAT, low GPA” is said by people with 3.0 who get 2000-2100 and think that’s high. They would be in the bottom 25% for ‘Ivy-level’ schools no matter which factor you consider. </p>
<p>Now what can we say about your chances? Well, not much, I can only offer some analysis. For many top colleges the admit pool has about 1-3% who were sub 3.5 GPA. Depending on the applicant pool this could mean from 50 to 250 people getting in with low GPAs, although I imagine many of those spots do get swallowed up by people who came from truly hard magnet schools. Still, when you consider how many correlations there are between GPA and ECs, it’s really hard to just dismiss all the remaining sub-3.5 people as having ‘amazing ECs’. It’s more likely that of those people with truly high SATs and low GPAs but good ECs, there are a few who have something different to offer–like diversity, a heart-wrenching background or great humor. Of course you could also end up in the reject pool, where there is a ton of room for everyone. </p>
<p>So IMO, you’re not out of the running for the top schools (this gets said a LOT more for low SAT/high GPA although statistics prove otherwise–probably because more people are in that situation) and if there is one you really want to attend it’s probably worth the application fee. If you get national achievement semifinalist, by the way, you’ll probably have many of them waived for you anyway.</p>