My son is a junior at a high school at a competitive school in the Bay Area (CA). He currently has a 3.89 GPA and he is planning to take 6 AP courses through high school with 5 honors. He is also very involved in extracurriculars. He got a 35 on the ACT and 780 on the Math II Subject Test.
He is planning to apply to:
U Michigan BBA Ross
CMU Computer Engineering
UIUC Computer Engineering
Georgia Tech Computer Engineering
Cornell Computer Engineering
Purdue Computer Engineering
Stanford
the UCs
Waterloo
UT Austin Computer Engineering
Caltech
Do you have any suggestions on other competitive colleges and how do you think his chances are for the ones above?
Yes, have you solved the cost issue this time? For your daughter, you had to decline an ED offer to CMU. This list looks the same as hers. Where did she actually go?
I’m assuming that the 6 AP classes are all math and sciences.
For any competitive Bay Area high school (of the Monta Vista/Mission San Jose/Lynbrook/Gunn/Paly/Saratoga type), 6 APs in 4 years may be slightly low given that the average applicant will probably take approximately 10 AP classes.
11 AP/honors classes should be considered very rigorous on the transcript.
@Hamurtle The number of AP to be considered very rigorous depends on the school even it is likely not consider high rigor with 6 AP in many schools in Bay area.
For OP, have you check the NPCs of these schools? Merit scholarship is not likely for most, but a couple, of those OOS schools. Purdue should be a match to low match. Most of the other ones and different level of reaches. For UMich, is he applying to CoE with Ross pre-admit? If so, the uwGPA appears below their admission average. Can you recalculate his uwGPA without subgrade?
My daughter went to UIUC, she completed her undergrad, doing here masters now. She liked the school very much. My son is really wanted to get in robotics, CMU is the best bet, whereas my daughter’s case she was interested in computer science.
The reason was the major. CE is very confusing as in some schools it is the combination of hardware + software, some schools it is software, and in some, it is only hardware. When we applied, we didn’t know it is hardware focused, but later came to know. After looking at the industry recruited from the class, it is mostly hardware. We explained this misunderstanding to the school, they are fine with that.
"For any competitive Bay Area high school (of the Monta Vista/Mission San Jose/Lynbrook/Gunn/Paly/Saratoga type), 6 APs in 4 years may be slightly low given that the average applicant will probably take approximately 10 AP classes.
11 AP/honors classes should be considered very rigorous on the transcript."
I don’t think that’s true and even if it were, once you hit 6 or 7 APs, you’ve satisfied the rigor that selective colleges look for. I’m pretty familiar with the schools you mentioned and most students don’t start taking APs till 11th grade. You could take 4 APs a jr and sr and maybe one as a soph (Calc) but that’s really 9 or 10. A lot of these kids play a sport or do an EC so they only take six class max, sometimes 5 in a given year.
I agree. Even UMich that claims to view GPA and course rigor to be most important factor, 5 or 6 AP is sufficient for them. Note that not all AP are equal in rigor.