<p>The schools I have in mind are Yale, Brown, Princeton, Cornell, UPenn, Duke, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill, BU, and University of Virginia (in order of difficulty according to recent standards.)</p>
<p>My GPA is 4.4.
I'm a Sophmore and I just took a practice PSAT (the booklet things that they give you to practice) and got a 180. I obviously need to bump that up (if you know the type of PSAT score you'd need to get into the schools mentioned, please post!), I'm doing an honors project, taking two honors classes, and AP class, and my EC's are as follows:</p>
<p>Junior Varsity Tennis 2009-Present
Varsity Spring Track 2009-Present
Future Head of Graphics for the Schreiber Times (Newspaper)
President of the Sophmore Class Club
Junior Varsity Quiz Bowl Team Captain
LI Challenge Competitor
Summer Institute for the Gifted Participant 2009, 2011
Student of the Month Recipient November 2009 for raising peer awareness of teen bullying.</p>
<p>PS: I scored a 710 out of 780 on the Biology SAT II and was on the Principal’s Honor Roll all 4 Quarters last year, and I was a NYS Scholar Athlete during each sports season (Had 4.0+ during all seasons).</p>
<p>I don’t think I can chance you as a sophomore. I don’t know what quality system your school is on; you should provide some letter grades. If you got a 180 on the PSAT though, your current projection would be a 2000 max on the SAT, which isn’t nearly enough to get you into half those colleges on that list. I don’t recall colleges caring about the PSAT. You want at least a 2200 on the SAT to be secure.</p>
<p>Work on ECs. You don’t seem to be concentrated on a particular EC yet. Find your passion and pursue it. Pursue more competition titles as well. Don’t forget about community service; you could go off your expertise in teen bullying.</p>
<p>*The PSAT was basically a practice FOR a practice. I’m taking it again next year. As for the EC’s, I’m planning on holding officer positions in all of them and continuing all of them.</p>
<p>Wonderful. The only real importance of the PSAT that I can think of, though, is National Merit. And students usually get higher on the real SAT than projected on the PSAT. I got like 200 points higher; then again, I got like…4 hours of sleep before the PSAT. Zzz.</p>
<p>Unless you are a Virginia resident, UVA should probably be moved up two spots.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone can tell you much right now without official test scores. Those will go up a lot between now and the beginning of your senior year. For now you should just focus on taking advantage of whatever opportunities you have, especially in terms of taking harder classes. It’s good to think about college early but you don’t have to worry much yet.</p>
<p>The PSAT does not count in admissions, but it counts for the National Merit Scholarship. Depending on your state and how the score cutoffs change between now and then you will probably need between 205 and 220.</p>
<p>For the SAT, you want around 2300 for top Ivies unless you have something incredible going for you. A 2300 and 4.4 are good academic numbers Yale and Princeton. You can certainly get in with lower scores but it becomes much harder. For most of your other schools you’ll need 2100-2250 depending on the specific school and what other qualifications you have. The average SAT score at Cornell is currently only around 2080. Not all of the improvement you’ll need has to come from studying; if you’re taking hard classes in math and English then the work you do in school will help prepare you also.</p>
<p>The Biology SAT II is out of 800, not 780. A 710 is a fairly solid score, but I expect someone with your commitment can get better Subject Test scores than that over the next couple years.</p>
<p>I would not recommend listing NYS Scholar Athlete on an application because it is an extremely easy award to get and it is redundant with others. They will already know that you have high grades and play sports from other areas of your application. The Common App only gives spaces for 5 awards so you need to use them wisely.</p>