Ok so I just want to know if my grades are good enough for these schools. I understand that EC’s and essays are extremely important but I am very strong in both of those right now and I’m more concerned about the academic portion.
Major: Computer Engineering
Freshman year: 3.8
Sophomore: 3.9
Junior: 3.8
I have taken the hardest courses my school offers, all of my core classes have been honors/AP.
ACT: 34
Sat math 2: 710
Sat chem: 730
Chem AP: 5
English 3 AP: 4
APUSH: 4
My school only allowed us to take 3 AP core classes by junior year. The only one I didn’t take was World History AP. Chem AP was an elective and I took it along with honors physics junior year and it was honors because they didn’t offer AP physics.
Rank: 51 out of 600 something (8.3%)
I am in the state of Texas so I am in state for UT Austin
Senior schedule
Physics AP calculus
Calc BC
AP econ/gov
AP eng 4
AP comp sci
AP photography
Grades are fine, nothing noteworthy. Neither will hurt you nor make you stand out. You’re in a good position academically, but people often overrate their ec’s and essays, and those are what get you through the door.
Your rank is going to make you a holistic review candidate at UT. Your ACT is very strong. Your ECs, essays any any extenuating circumstances- socioeconomic level, race, etc. will be factors. Computer engineering is pretty competitive. Read about PACE and see if it is an option you would consider. Read Appendix D of this report (which is a little dated).
On top of this, almost all of the kids who are accepted have a deep involvement with CS in HS so I hope you are correct in your assessment of yourself as being very strong in EC’s (especially involving CS).
Your grades are somewhat on the low end and your SAT Math II score (69th percentile) very low for computer engineering for schools like Stanford, Berkeley CE, CMU SCS, Rice etc. What we don’t see is the depth of your involvement in EC’s, particularly CS related, so it’s hard to know if you have offsetting factors in your favor.
Based upon what you wrote earlier this year, I’m afraid I would say that most of the schools on your list are pretty high reaches for you. You need to develop a better list of match and safety schools.
In my opinion (for what it is worth), your scores and grades pass the first bar for these schools. GTech, I know, looks closely at math grades and rigor and your Math SAT 2 scores is low for these schools.
I don’t think you have any advantage over the 1000s that apply. So I think you need to search for good match schools for your stats.
Stanford, Berkeley, CMU and MIT are the four top CS schools in the country and you chose three of these four to ask about. Are you one of the absolute top CS HS kids in the country? I think you can pretty much answer that without our help.
These schools are by no means my entire list, these are just the highest ranked ones and I was wondering if they where even worth applying to. I’m also looking as schools like UCLA and USC and if I just get rejected by every single college then I’m automatic acceptance at A&M so I’ll just go there.
All right, I’m sorry to have sounded so pessimistic but I wanted you to understand how difficult the very top schools you targeted are to get into. As long as you have some match and safety schools by all means apply away and see what happens. Best of luck to you!