I’m new to this and need to educate myself. DS goes to LaG HS in NYC and plans on going to an art school (CalArt, RISD, NYC art schools etc.). PSAT 1150 and not sure what it means (I didn’t go to school in this country). Trying to figure out where to focus - grades versus portfolio versus SAT. Thank you.
@NellieBelly I’m in the same position… From Canada and now living in the United States, with a daughter who is going to apply to art school. She is in 10th grade now and will only be applying to schools in California. I’ve looked into this and I think it can be quite school-specific. I’ve been looking at each school site, and for the ones that fit her particular niche, none of them require the SAT and so she isn’t going to take it, on the theory that the energy is better spent elsewhere. From what I’ve been able to tell from conversations with people who know more than me about this, for many of the art schools, so long as you have a baseline decent GPA, it is really the portfolio that tells the tale. They want to know that you can handle the liberal arts portion of the curriculum, and in some cases GPA will help determine some scholarships, but for example they don’t care whether you’ve taken a million APs and that sort of thing, as long as you have met the graduation requirements of the high school. But if the portfolio isn’t strong, no standardized test score or GPA is going to make the difference. I know that there are some schools that are more academically focused, and I believe RISD is one of them. In the college majors forum there is a visual arts and film subforum for kids applying to those programs, and you will probably get more responses in that forum then you have here, particularly from people who are on the East Coast and who know more about those schools. Good luck to your son, and I will be curious to hear how everything turns out!