I have a 2350 SAT, 4.0 GPA, some national level writing & Latin awards, a few leadership positions at school and editorships outside of school. Upper middle class, currently attending a competitive public high school in MA.
How hard is it? Should I even bother? Most importantly, would attending so late (should I get accepted) harm me in college admissions?
Supercilious. It comes through…
@Center no, these are honest questions…not sure if I should be flattered bc I know how competitive it is to gain admittance to prep schools & I’m not confident that my ECs and stats are good enough
You are nuts to to go to boarding school for senior year. Your chances at top schools will go down as you will be competing with more qualified and legacy students all from the same place. You would better off going to a lesser ranked BS or a lower income public. Seriously. Edited to add: depends on your goal. You mention hurting chances for college. NO. But going into a more competitive fishbowl will. You want the Boarding School experience… ? By all means but it will not help you be more competitive for college admissions.
@Center thanks for the input
As far as I know, most of the handful new seniors are international students on exchange programs. I know there is a special designed program for new seniors, but I don’t know how domestic students are benefitting from it. I would get in contract with an AO. They should be willing to explain how it works.
There’s no point in an American student starting in senior year. The college admissions cycle is already in high gear.
Consider applying as a ‘repeat junior’ if u are really intent on doing boarding school.
I met an Andover student who entered as a new 11th grader. Same situation as you. He decided to repeat grade 11. You should consider the same.
I asked this question because my school, though it has 14 AP classes (which is an ok if not excellent number) doesn’t allow us to take more than 6. There’s also severe GPA deflation, and college admission results have been really bad except for MIT (for the aforementioned reasons, I suspect). But apparently transferring senior year is actually detrimental, so I’ll forget the idea
I don’t think Andover even offers AP courses.
I think they do mostly in math, sciences and some languages. They are marked as “AP level” at least.
And some social sciences e.g. (econ, comparatitive gov’t)
Regardless, many Andover students takes AP tests in subjects in which there are officially no AP courses. Having said that, that is a really bad reason to want to transfer.
Andover offers AP courses - Calculus AB and BC, Chemistry, Chinese Language and Culture (no one has taken this AP course since school year 2011-2012), Computer Science A and AB (no one has taken AB since school year 2009-2010), French Language and Culture* (no one has taken this since school year 2011-2012), French Literature (no one has taken this since school year 2009-2010), German Language and Culture (no one has taken this since school year 2011-2012), and Statistics (no one has taken this since school year 2011-2012).
Note: Those “no one has taken this since school year …” are based on the report I am reading right now.
These AP tests were discontinued after the May 2009 administration.