SAT: 1520 out of 1600
GPA: 3.91 W out of 5.00 (school does not do UW)
AP: AP Environmental Science 5
I also plan on submitting an art portfolio since I’ve been doing art for about 12 years
Female, East Asian, upper middle class
However, my school is an extremely competitive public high school with a toxic academic environment (basically, if you’re not taking all honors and aren’t taking every AP available then you’re looked down upon). The teachers are unfair, for example I ended the year in APES with a B+ but received a 5 on the official AP test. I’ve taken a relatively rigorous course load every year since freshman year about 3 to 4 honors every year, and also was in a program where if your grades are high enough, you can skip Earth Science and Algebra I and go right to Biology and Geometry. AP courses aren’t available until junior year, in which you can take APES, APUSH, AP Chem, or AP Bio. I’ve only taken the APES test which I got a 5 on, and this year as a senior I am taking AP Lit, AP Bio, and AP Calculus AB.
I know colleges really don’t care about personal issues, but I’ve always had a lot of trouble focusing in class since 7th grade and have been suicidal for years now. Only recently have I been professionally diagnosed with clinical depression and ADD which is no shocker to me because my issues have gotten worse enough to drastically affect my grades (to put things in perspective, I have an F in AP Bio because I did not hand in an essay and a D in AP Calc because I don’t do the homework which leads to horrible test grades). There have been a few days this year so far where I haven’t been able to get out of bed because of my depression. I’m currently in therapy, but I don’t feel like it’s working and it doesn’t seem like it would work out in college.
There’s not much I can do about my GPA at this point and I know colleges tend not to accept students who have mental health issues, but I’m scared they will think I’m lazy due to my bad GPA and good SAT. Will this hurt my chances of getting into one of the top LACs? (Middlebury, Colby, Grinnell, Lehigh, etc.)