<p>my stats are:
3.46 unweighted, 4.15 weighted
2230 SAT
rigorous high school curriculum - 14 honors, 7 APs (lang, us, chem, bio, spanish lang, calc ab, stat) by the end of senior year</p>
<p>my ec's are:
-10 years of dance, also a student teacher
-8 years of vocal music
-5 years of tae kwon do, 1st degree black belt, also a student teacher
-volunteer with red cross, special olympics, march of dimes
-researched at a human genetics lab for 2 summers (work will be published)
-senior officer in a club at school</p>
<p>i'm applying for a science major. do i still have a chance even though my gpa is low?</p>
<p>You have a chance but they’re not as good as your SAT would have it if it were allowed to stand alone. Make sure to apply to other places that may value a high SAT a lot (avoid UCs and other some other top 20s). By the way, you don’t apply “for” a science major. You maybe write about it in your essays, but you do not apply for it. It won’t effect your chances on admissions. Luckily for you, I get the feeling that the “unweighted” GPAs published by many selected schools is actually a “reweighted” GPA from some formula they come up with (like they may add .5 to APs or something). </p>
<p>The performing arts talent and scientific research should help a bit (especially the pending publication). Did you take and do well on any AP
s? Maybe it can be used to suggest that your grades may be deflated vs. your knowledge of the coursework. Most APs are not fact regurgitation so doing well will primarily indicate that the courses may have been unusually rigorous. The unfortunate thing that I think a GPA and a test score like that says to a selective school’s adcoms is: “I will not engage the coursework that much beyond an assignment by assignment and exam by exam basis” with a heavier emphasis put on “exam by exam” basis which may alternatively or subsequently imply that you took the rigorous courseload to merely try to look good as opposed to taking them for interests sake. You have to be really careful with these sorts of stats. I would write excellent essays (definitely do the optional supplement) to display intellectual engagement beyond the numbers.</p>
<p>I think my essays are really good but neither of them were optional… Am I missing something? And I took the exams for lang chem and us and got 4s on Chem and us an a 5 on lang. The other 4 APs I’m taking right now as a senior. On a scale of 1-10, how likely is it that I’ll get in? 10 being the highest</p>
<p>No, you’re not. I found out that the supplement that was apparently optional the past two admissions cycles is now mandatory. Just make sure you did well on them. I would say 4-5ish(I’m calibrating vs. admit rate which is 27% or 2.7 on a 10 point scale), however, again, you have course rigor, good AP scores, and a great SAT. I’ll say that a reweighted GPA may likely put you at like 3.6 something which is just outside of the 25%. The GPA basically makes you an average applicant). Again, your score is very attractive (75% of last year’s admitted class). And you demonstrated ability in the APs. Make sure to send the AP scores to admissions now. They’ll help some. I want aluminum to chime in because they normally chance a bit harsher than I do. </p>
<p>Just based on stats: According to that, if the app. pool is the same caliber as last years, your GPA would comprise 20% of that pool and a little less than 1/3 of those with the GPA will be admitted (luckily your 3.49 is at the very top part of this tier). On the other hand, your SAT Score comprises 35-40ish percent of the pool and when you have that, you have maybe a 55% percent success rate. This is not exactly how this works but I’ll combine these to categories and make the average like 45%. Again, your SAT is increasing your chances. I appreciate Emory for being a little more transparent with the admissions so that we can take a look at this. What you may have going for you is yield protection. Emory may admit you because they view you as more likely to matriculate (even if you don’t, this is just hypothetical) because they may assume that many competitor schools won’t overlook the GPA (and unfortunately at most of the other top 20s, your SAT is around the median of ENROLLED students and not top quartile of ADMITTED students, where usually admits have much higher stats. as you can see in the document, so your SAT at those places won’t be as attractive). They’ll be able to snatch your SAT score and just make others pump up the GPA stats.</p>
<p>Would be nice to get aluminum’s take because they’re usually a bit harsher than I am.</p>
<p>Your GPA/stats are similar to my D who is a freshman at Emory (accepted RD.) She had a 4.21 weighted GPA, top 2% rank, 5 APs and all honors courses, slightly lower SAT score but 2 SAT subject test scores of 750+. Your performing arts EC’s should be a plus: they have many a cappella groups and dance classes.</p>
<p>Emory has been a strong demonstrated interest school in the past and their essay supplement questions were previously reflective of this. However, this may change since there was an article indicating the new Admissions Dean may be re-thinking this policy. Emory is very interested in good writers (their writing program was ranked #1 nationwide in a survey last year) and students are required to take writing courses as part of their curriculum requirements.</p>
<p>Demonstrated interest is gone. He wasn’t rethinking it, he flat out said it. The thing that concerns me about OP is that I fear the ED1 and ED2 rounds are going better than expected for Emory this year (in terms of student caliber). If they were able to make higher than normal caliber students commit to coming, they may raise their thresholds in the RD round depending on who they have applying and if it’s more than previous years. They may assume that more very high caliber students are genuinely interested in Emory than they were before. If I were in OPs position, I would be hoping that Emory gets the same amount of apps as the previous 2 years (around 17.5k).</p>
We agree what the red flag is.
My view on this is always the same: Unless you’re a URM, athlete, legacy, or famous, they most likely won’t overlook the GPA.
I think the OP should apply (you should always apply. $75 in the scheme of things is nothing. I wish I had realized that years ago. I would’ve applied to more than 3 schools. Worked out in the end, but I could’ve very easily been without a college admission upon graduation). But he should seriously consider Oxford as well.
There’s a poster on CC that knows Oxford really well, and based off what he’s posted here, it sounds like a terrific start to your college career (albeit a bit boring. It’s in the middle of nowhere).
</p>
<p>You messed up this statement.</p>
<p>I’ll make up realistic (but easy for me to calculate) example based off that PDF file to show you.</p>
<p>Assume there are 15000 applicants RD, of which 3000 have a 3.0-3.49 GPA. Emory accepts 4000 total. Out of the 4000, 240, were in the GPA range of 3.0-3.49.</p>
<p>So, out of the 3000, only 240 were admitted. That’t not a little less than 1/3 as you claimed. That’s like less than 8% or something. Out of those 240, most of them were URMs, athletes, legacy, etc… There might be 40 spots (that’s a generous figure) left for people who aren’t any of those.</p>
<p>On the bright side, this guy will probably be in the priority for those 40 or so remaining spots.</p>
<p>College admissions are ridiculous. I think we’re getting close to the point where something needs to be done to make them easier.
I think it’s absurd that some kids can’t go to these really good schools because of mistakes they made when they were 15 years old.</p>
<p>Give serious thought to applying to Oxford also. The admissions decisions are independent, there’s no additional cost to also applying to Oxford, and practically everyone overestimates their competitiveness for admission (to college generally).</p>
<p>A lot of this on CC comes because other high schoolers with little to no idea of the process end up commenting on all the chance threads. The people who actually know what’s going on are usually ignored (because they’re in the minority. And because they rate the chances as a lot lower than most).</p>
<p>Particularly with applying to Oxford, though… It doesn’t require another transcript or application fee. It’s a small cost for another decision–one which could have significant effects on their lives.</p>
<p>aluminum: I just did it on a bracket by bracket basis. I pretty much knew it wasn’t how it works. because I guess I was doing what you said and basically saying 6% of 15k as opposed to 6% of the 4.5k admits, where the latter is a lot lower. I think the number I gave was maybe a ceiling and worse case scenario, the OP is viewed as a typical applicant and their chances are more more like 3/10. </p>
<p>As for admissions, yes it’s getting ridiculous. They almost seem like medical schools, but with a slightly more level head on their shoulders (the elite schools that is). As in, it’s kind of clear many of us are only taking students with very high numbers to make us look good in the rankings (as in, if it wasn’t for that, they wouldn’t be as intense). Again, as I’ve said before, some places are justified because they are indeed very rigorous and your standard high achiever will not do well in such environments, but at most, they certainly could. But again, it’s still better than med. schools where if one attends a selective private or public university where many of the pre-req. science courses try to focus on critical thinking and then you get a B/B+ in most of them, you’re screwed (worse, most med. schools, except some of the very elite, won’t bother to take course rigor into consideration. They are very silly and rather just take the person with the inflated GPA and decent MCAT). This makes no sense considering the fact that most med. school courses (you know, the non-clinical stage) play to the students’ strengths that had been developed beyond belief back in high school (they are memorization based). If you “know”, then you do well (needless to say, they must whip out the prep books to do well on the boards. Either that, or the instructors have to go out of their way to write exam questions that look similar to them. Seems like HS, but on super steroids and all science!). No need to synthesize, create, derive, or infer much (if most pre-med undergrads had to take 7 science courses equivalent to the most difficult undergrad instructors, I’m sure they would not do well in medical school). Needless to say, the trick is to simply take those types of courses in UG to get a high GPA (which will then screw you on the MCAT, which is totally different from med. school type of thinking) and then take an expensive MCAT prep course to teach you how to problem solve. Law school is also weird because they don’t care about course rigor either (and a stellar LSAT is less likely to save you from a medium GPA than a stellar MCAT is), so they can’t really decide to go into less stereotypical majors unless they are extremely strong. For example, a chemistry major pre-law may basically be shooting themselves in the foot if they attend a selective undergraduate institution because law schools expect perfection no matter what. I would really like to see most polsci majors go over and make a 3.8 plus in chemistry with the amount of work they put into their polsci courses. While both require a decent amount of work, the same amount of work over in chem will likely result in significantly lower grades. </p>
<p>At least elite undergrad. admissions are not that damned stupid yet. The things they screen for are at least slightly more relevant if you assume that most students want to complete a challenging curriculum at the institution. The day UG admissions gets as dumb as that, elite highered will need some type of overhaul. They haven’t gotten to the point where they ask for “well-crafted” perfection yet, it’s more like a “do your best” perfection.</p>
<p>Don’t the UCs take students with really inflated GPAs though (because the majority are from California), so the UC GPAs for say, UCLA, UCSD, and UCB can average something really close to 4.0? Maybe you should be able to get into one of those two because your GPA is now okay in that context, and then the SAT is desirable.</p>
<p>Mono- Assuming the rest of your UC application at that standard I think either of those schools is a possibility. It is important to remember applying to UCD and UCSD these schools both claim to do the wholistic approach, but from my understanding not to the degree of Berkeley and UCLA (based on the vibes I was given while visiting both UCB and UCSD when I was college searching) so I think your two choices will place a little more emphasis on face value (stats and scores) rather than things like ecs and the like. All that being said I’d say apply to both and I’d give either a moderate chance</p>