Hello!
I’m currently a highschool student in Scotland. I was wondering if top US institutions (such as MIT) accept Scottish Highers/Advanced higher exams in their application process?
How are Scottish grades viewed when compared to A levels, IB etc.?
Colleges will know how to interpret foreign transcripts. If they aren’t sure, they will require a translation. You will be told that up front, though, but I doubt MIT will have any problems.
I doubt any university would require a transcript translation for a school in Scotland. ?
Not a literal translation but possibly an interpretation.
In a paragraph that is almost a direct answer to this on the MIT website:
“ MIT admissions counselors are trained to understand the educational system in your part of the world. We do not try to convert your grades to the American system, or to find other sorts of equivalence. You will not be competing against your classmates or students in other parts of the world; we do not have caps or quotas for countries. We consider each student as an individual as they proceed through our process.”
I am pretty sure that MIT admissions will understand the grading system used in Scotland.
However, I would not expect MIT to accept any more than one or two students from Scotland in a given year. You will need to be close to the strongest student in your high school at least in math and science to have any realistic chance of getting accepted to MIT. As an international student at MIT I never met any students from Scotland, but that might have been either a coincidence or based on the high quality and relatively reasonable cost of the excellent universities in Scotland.
Being able to pay for education in the US as an international student is an entirely different issue.
I think the reason you might not see a Scotsman at MiT, is the last I checked school is free for them in Scotland and they have some pretty outstanding schools like St. Andrews and Edinburgh. I’m curious why you’d consider MiT for undergrad. I really don’t see you getting a big bang for your buck. You will have to pay something I suspect here for tuition. Isn’t it free still?
MIT admissions will understand the grading system used in Scotland. and judge you in that basis