<p>I live in new york city and i attend a specialized highschool, the ones where they require you to take the SHSATS to get into, would a slightly lower gpa in the specialized highschool still be preferred over the slightly gpa in a zoned public high school?</p>
<p>because i'm certain that higher grades in specialized highschools like, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, York, is harder than public high schools.</p>
<p>I don't know if this applies to all specialized high schools, but my literature teacher once spoke to admissions officers from both Yale and MIT who said that "the focus of our school was too narrow". With that being said, we still had 4 people get into Yale, 1 into Princeton, but none into Harvard. A good percentage of our class applied to the HYP, so I think we may have indeed been penalized for going to a school specializing in Math, Science, and Technology.</p>
<p>Just my two cents.</p>
<p>which high school did you go to, iljets?</p>
<p>which nyc specialized hs? i go to American Studies @ Lehman</p>
<p>I have heard that some schools, like Harvard, think specialized schools are too "one dimensional." I currently attend the Massachusetts Academy of Math and Sciences, and the school doesn't get anyone into Harvard. However, I'm sure this is only a couple schools' viewpoint, not the majority.</p>
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would a slightly lower gpa in the specialized highschool still be preferred over the slightly gpa in a zoned public high school
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<p>In answer to your question, no because you are going to be evaluated in context of the opportunities available to you at Stuy, bx Science and Tech and you will be evaluated as to how well you did in comparision to your peers who are also in the pool.</p>
<p>if your school has a full complement of AP courses and you only take one, you will not have taken the most rigerous curriculum the school offers. If the zone h.s. only offers 1 AP and the student took that class, s/he is taking the most rigerous curriculum the school offers.</p>
<p>GPAs are often lower at tough schools which is why they look at you within the context of your school. If you rank well you're great.</p>
<p>I atcually turned down a specialized school for a regular public school. Best decision of my life. I ended doing extremely well at my regular high school: I love where I go and my teachers all know me very well because although my school isn't as small as American Studies or HSMSE, it is nowhere near as large as Stuy or Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech. At my regular high school, I am what my teachers call a "superstar", heading many clubs and organizing many school events which may not have happened had I attended a specialized school (I may have been too busy studying or doing hw, trying to achieve good grades and a high rank at a highly competitive school). In contrast, my friends from junior high who chose specialized over a regular school had mixed results: one of them (@ Stuy) will be attending City College next year because she didn't get in anywhere else, another (@ Bronx Science) will not be graduating on time, another (Bronx Science again) will be attending MIT, and a fourth (Stuy) will be going to school with me next year. Conclusion: it doesn't matter where you go, just make sure you do well wherever it is you end up.</p>
<p>If anything, you get the benefit of the doubt from college adcoms. Top colleges know that specialized high schools churn out top-notch students consistently, and so rely on them a lot when making decisions. There's a certain preference that goes both ways, and I think it's not just students tending to desire top-tier colleges, but also colleges looking closely at prestigious high schools.</p>
<p>I believe around 30 Stuy kids were accepted to Dartmouth this year. I think in the context of college admissions, that is a LOT for a single school. Of course, it helps to be one of the smartest kids at your school too...</p>
<p>My D went to a specialised school. Very tough school. All kids coming in have straight As in their original high schools. A few maintain that at this school. Do colleges/scholarship committees make allowances for lower GPAs because of the schools specialty/difficulty. No, No & No. My D and most of her friends would have been much better off college choice wise and scholarshipwise if they had stayed in their 'regular' high schools with their top rankings, their stellar grades and ECs. In the end GPA/ACTorSAT combo trumps most everything.</p>
<p>Are they better prepared for college than they would have been cruising with easy As. Probably. Is the trade off worth it. Juries still out.</p>
<p>I guess it depends on the school, but some very top HSs send 30% plus of their graduates to ivies. Colleges are well aware that it took a lot to get into these schools and the competition is far beyond that at 99% of high schools. They know these grads will do very well in college.</p>
<p>Once an admissions officer from Harvard (David Evans) came to my school (TJ) and told us that there are <em>probably</em> less people accepted to Harvard from this local region once TJ was established and all the smart kids went to the same school than pre-TJ. So iuno. 12 students out of a class of 420 were accepted last year.</p>
<p>Here's what I think. Specialized high schools provide a competitive atmosphere that motivate students to do things like independent research, national competitions, and so forth. If you can motivated yourself to do that and can find the support for it (financial and otherwise) at your base school, the loss is not that great for not going to the magnet school. Be a superstar.</p>
<p>Going to one of the aforementioned specialized high schools, here's what I noticed from college admissions this year -
- With regards to admission to selective colleges, but not quite HYPSM, colleges do give leeway to students in terms of their GPA. For example, it's common to be admitted to BU with a plain "B" average; also, several students have gotten into UCLA with averages in the low nineties (3.5-3.6) and SATs in the 2100's, and UCLA is notoriously focused on gpa and is difficult for out-of-state students. Students with a 93 (~3.8) can count on NYU, and while it would not count as a safety, it is unusual for a student with that average to get turned down.
- A 94+ average with an "in-range" SAT can practically guarantee you a spot at a top-10 LAC.
- When it comes to HYPSM, all bets are off. All valedictorians from my 4 years in the school were accepted to Harvard, but some of the most outstanding students and brilliant people were rejected from a combination of those colleges. Usually, people who apply to those schools have outstanding grades, so those colleges just don't care to see if your 95 average would actually be a 99 average in another school. </p>
<p>Anyway, those are just some of my observations.</p>
<p>It saddens me to think that an admissions officer from ANY university would think that the specialized high schools are one-dimensional. I'm finishing my senior year of high school and think that an English class in my junior year was the most challenging out of all my classes.</p>
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I have heard that some schools, like Harvard, think specialized schools are too "one dimensional."
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Hmmmm. My daughter attended an Arts high school, and there were 2 admits to Harvard during the years she was there -- which is probably better than it sounds, because it's a small school and very few students apply to Ivies. (A lot of the most talented students head off to conservatories instead, and there are a lot more who are talented in the arts but not particularly strong with academics, who end up attending far less selective colleges or the state U. )</p>
<p>So I'm thinking it depends on what you mean by "specialty" school. My guess is that if you have an <em>academic</em> elite school, such as a Bronx Science or TJ equivalent, you get such a concentration of kids aspiring to Ivies that it becomes hard for the colleges to distinguish among them -- no kid really stands out and gets the sort of recs or support from g.c.'s that happens in other schools. When the "specialty" is something other than high-end academics --- then each year you have a couple of kids who stand out head and shoulders above the rest, their teacher write rave reviews, they've got the class rank and all sorts of honors & achievements at their school... and then they have an advantage of standing out both because of their own accomplishments and because their school also looks "special". </p>
<p>And maybe "one dimensional" is really a code word meaning simply that the college gets far too many applicants from the same school and they all look just the same.</p>
<p>My daughter is graduating next month from a magnet high school. She applied for admission to the program in the spring of her last year in middle school (the magnet school accepts about 1/3 of its applicants). D had a great experience in the magnet program, but she found the curriculum to be very demanding and there was definitely NO grade inflation. She is graduating in the top 1/4 of her class with an unweighted GPA in the 3.4 range and an ACT score of 31. Initially, I was a little worried about how she would fare in the college admissions process compared to kids who went to easier high schools and who had accumulated higher GPAs by taking less demanding courses. The reality, however, is that many colleges do indeed seem to evaluate a student in the context of the overall difficulty of their secondary school/curriculum. D was admitted to every college to which she applied (including some very competitive colleges/programs) and was invited to join the honors program at two universities. Many of her friends who went to easier high schools were turned down at the same colleges that D applied to even though they had higher GPAs than D. So my take on the OP's question is that a specialized high school often does help in the college admissions process and that the extra work is well worth it. Perhaps the greatest advantage of such high schools is that their graduates may well be better prepared for the rigor of college classes than most of their peers.</p>
<p>Collges have officers that know high schools pretty well. Also, just to clear the myth that floats around here:</p>
<p>** COLLEGES DO NOT COMPARE GPA'S FROM STUDENTS AT DIFFERENT HIGH SCHOOLS!!! **</p>
<p>going to Stuy helps a lot... about 15% of the students ends up going to a ivy and 99-100% ends up going to at least a 4 year college...
most of the Students goes to very good schools</p>