API Consideration

Chance Me / Match Me!
1

hi all:

first off, i’m a new user to this site, so apologies if this is the wrong place to post this. i’ve been browsing through a lot of these chanceme threads, and i’m noticing discrepancies between testing scores and gpa for a lot of applicants. some of these students are 4.0 UW students and seem to do amazing in school, but their testing scores just feel… off to me. take this student: 4.04 UW gpa, 4.89 W, but his SAT subject scores are all mostly below 750, and SAT I math score was below 700. where I go to school, even the non-honors math students easily go 750+ on the math section. i see these kind of stats in other threads as well, and frankly they’re surprising, as the 4.0 students i spend my time around are also virtually perfect standardized testing students. the only explanation i can come up with here is that courses are just generally easier to succeed in outside my school.

and it got me to thinking, since a 4.0 UW at my school is relatively rare, how much do colleges really factor in the difficulty of your high school into your gpa into their holistic review? I myself have a 3.93 UW GPA, which might be passable, but my school is not a magnet school: it’s just a public school with an API of 10/10. yes, it is a top 100 school in the united states, but the effect the some of the extremely difficult courses have had on my gpa is negative, even if they have prepared my for testing very well. do colleges even consider school API, or do they just look at ranking? because as far as i know, my school does not provide an actual ranking system.

this post isn’t very organized, i understand, but what do you all feel on how much colleges consider high school difficulty?

2

So when colleges look at an application, they look for a few things. They know that every high school is different, so often, many schools allow for a little leeway there. On the other hand, standardized tests are often used to compare the students. So it is imperative that you have a good GPA - that means that you’re able to handle the work that your school throws at you. However, standardized tests are going to show colleges how you stand on a national level. Obviously course rigor plays a part in this as well, so the transcript is just as important.
So to sum it all up, your GPA is important because it shows your school if you can handle your workload. A GPA of <3.8 at any school no matter how difficult the school is, is going to bring up a red flag (also depends on the college but I’m talking Ivies here). So those students have an advantage when it comes to GPA. However, standardized tests are going to reflect their weaknesses. I think your 3.93 is fine for pretty much every school, so don’t worry about it too much.