Chance me? How much of a difference does an upward trend make?

Chance Me / Match Me!
1

<p>Freshman (1 advanced class out of a possible 2)
3.47
3.27</p>

<p>Sophomore (2 advanced classes out of a possible 3)
3.43
3.42</p>

<p>Junior (1 AP taken out of a possible 2, 1 honors taken out of a possible 2)
3.63
3.81</p>

<p>Senior (All AP's [3] and honors [1] along with theology requirement) As rigorous of a load as possible.
3.91 predicted</p>

<p>My school only allows us to take to take a maximum of 6 AP classes in our junior and senior year. </p>

<p>Also, I've taken 2 college classes. Calculus at SF State and Political Science at UC Berkeley. </p>

<p>I have a massive amount of leadership, excellent ec's, really good rec letters (one being from the SF assistant district attorney), and a lot of awards. I founded two companies that I've been heavily involved in, worked for over 5 months with the DA of SF, helped organize the National Black Prosecutor's conference, and have amassed a large amount of community service hours which I've been nationally recognized for. I have a good amount of awards as well. </p>

<p>From 7th grade until the tail end of 10th I was dealing with abuse and racially motivated attacks by a group of students that both physically hurt me and harassed my grandparents. I did very poorly in school, as is noted by my earlier GPA. </p>

<p>Also, my school does not weight GPA. </p>

<p>How much of an impact will my upwards trend have in admissions? </p>

<p>I plan on applying to Tulane, Georgetown, Claremont McKenna, Pomona, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, University of Wisconsin Madison, Bucknell, and Vassar. CMC is my top choice and I plan on applying ED II so they can see my first semester senior grades. </p>

<p>My ACT is a 33. </p>

<p>Suggestions? Chances?</p>

2

<p>I’ll take your word for it when you say that you have a massive amount of ECs, but many people post on these forums thinking that they have extraordinary achievements when in fact their ECs are average. Nevertheless, the biggest thing holding you back will be that GPA; as great as an upward trend may be, if the culmination of that is still just a 3.9, then it’s still going to hurt. </p>

<p>Stats are very important at the Claremont Colleges and Georgetown, the later of which putting a significant amount of emphasis on your GPA. These three schools will be reaches for you. I’d argue that you have a decent to good shot at all the others.</p>

3

<p>

Just? Out of a 4.0?? Surely that is not what you meant to say.</p>

<p>To the OP: Some schools don’t even count freshman year, and most others do discount it a fair amount when they see consistent improvement. It looks to me like you are saying you have a cumulative UW GPA of 3.51 or so. That’s pretty good, and a couple of real college courses helps also. At 33, your ACT is quite strong also.</p>

<p>Don’t pay attention to billabong on the EC’s either. It is clear you have some notable (and rather unique) EC’s, if working with the ADA is any indication. No matter what people on here try to tell you, a minute percentage of high school students have an opportunity like that. My S did something similar and he had a letter of rec from the Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Civil Court. It went a long way.</p>

<p>Forget about “chancing” though, it is a waste of time. No one here really knows what admissions people are thinking that particular year, or what kind of competition you might be up against. The main thing is that you have a list of schools that fit you and that represent a range of difficulty in admissions given past history. You have that. What I or anyone else tells you about your chances at Pomona or Tulane is not important. Telling someone that they are applying only to schools that are all very hard to get into or all too easy for them is more useful, but that is not the case here. It’s a good mix.</p>

<p>Now if you were looking for suggestions on other colleges that may fit your needs and wants, that is another issue. But you seem to have researched schools pretty well, given the wide assortment you present. Still, if you want to tell us the rest of what you like and need, people might have good suggestions. Are finances an issue at all? Are you going to need FA, which means that merit aid could be a deciding factor in where you go? What size school would you prefer? You have everything from the pretty small to the huge. Urban/suburban/rural? You have all of the above there too. Geography is all over as well, as is the weather factor. So is the sports and Greek scenes. You can see where I am going with this. Think about what environment would suit you best, and maybe there are other schools you are not aware of that would pop out as good candidates for you. Up to you. If you are happy with your current list, nothing wrong with that. All the schools have good to great reputations, and all would provide you with a fine education, no doubt.</p>

4

<p>Actually, many here have a great idea what the outcome will be, admissions is not the big mystery some believe it is.</p>

<p>While an upward trend is certainly better than a downward trend, at highly selective colleges they are looking for 4 years of consistent excellence. For that reason I believe CMC, Pomona and GTown are unrealistic reaches here.</p>

<p>For the UCs, what we know is they are primarily formula driven. The 33 will help, but if those are weighted GPAs, berkeley is highly unlikely and SD is a significant reach.</p>

<p>I would recommend adding some safeties, including UCs you have a better shot at, especially if Bucknell and OOS publics are not schools you are comfortable paying full price for.</p>

<p>During my many years as a counselor, a phenomena that I saw often was students who turned their performance around and believed colleges would “understand” and treat them as a candidate that had good grades throughout because they had shown their potential. What they did not realize is that these colleges had to turn down most with flawless grades, that with a sub 20% acceptance rate they are looking for sustained demonstrated achievement, not potential.</p>

5

<p>Redroses - </p>

<p>A) you misunderstand what I meant. Yes, in general people can talk about admissions at various schools and in obvious cases tell a student if they are way off base. What I was saying was that for many students no one here can say for sure if they will or won’t get into a certain school. In the end, except in the extreme cases, whether someone here thinks the OP will or won’t get into Pomona or Georgetown doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. After all, the OP is a URM. That makes a difference.</p>

<p>B) The OP specifically stated that the school doesn’t weight GPA. Try actually reading the post.</p>

<p>C) While I agree that the most selective schools often turn down people with better records, they do take into account improvement, especially with minority status. Fair or not, that is how it is. I think the OP has the record to get into Tulane most years, as well as Wisconsin. Still, I can’t disagree that a true safety or two wouldn’t be wise.</p>

6

<p>Please, it is embarrassingly difficult to try and sound so matter-of-factly when you aren’t familiar with the subject matter in the first place. Both of your posts in this thread have revealed that the grasp you may have on the college admissions process is skewed, or at the very least, misinformed. </p>

<p>First of all, nobody here misunderstood what you have previously said; you were just repeating some cliche statement of how you think that Chancing threads are pointless. That kind of thought process both ■■■■■■■ the growth of this forum and is directly counterproductive to the intentions of the OP; like Redroses said, the admissions game is not an enigma - it has many very well-defined rules and guidelines. Through the posts in this section of CollegeConfidential, numbers-driven data, and personal insight, many people are capable of making remarkably accurate predictions as to someone else’s chances of getting in to a certain school. </p>

<p>It goes without saying that the CC consenus on someone’s chances is not the final verdict. Nobody on this forum is pretending to be the adcom; you having to bring this up is just a failed attempt at backing out of a stupid comment you had previously made. Camron101 created this thread so as to gauge his chances at a few schools that he was considering; he was not asking for advice on “Greek life” and “geography” or whatever you were trying to communicate in that post of yours. </p>

<p>Second of all, as long as someone has a transcript, they have both an unweighted and a weighted GPA. Schools will regularly recalculate the GPAs of their students. So please, try actually being informed.</p>

<p>Perhaps you should return to the Parents Forum, or whereever it was that you garnered those highly impressive 3917 posts, before you say something else that reveals how little you really know.</p>

7

<p>

Talk about misinformed. There are many schools that have a strict 4.0 system and do not weight honors or AP courses. The OP himself said “My school does not weight GPA”. Go argue with the OP that they don’t know their own school’s procedures, if you want. So please, try actually being informed.</p>

<p>As far as CC being able to predict someone’s chances, that is patently ridiculous, since there have been hundreds, if not thousands of cases where people give wildly different opinions about the same poster. How would you know that CC has been “remarkably accurate”? Have you done a study of the success of chance thread results? How do people on here see the recs? How do they see the essay? As I said, if the stats are way off or easily within range, anyone can point that out. There are other factors here people cannot possibly see.</p>

<p>Unless someone points out the OP is way off base on a school, they are going to apply anyway. So what good does chancing do? I am free to express my opinion on the value of such a thread. In case the rest of my post escaped your comprehension, what I was saying was that, IMO, it is more valuable to get input on what schools might be a good fit for a student, depending on what they are looking for in a school. It seems to me that presenting one’s stats and one’s preferences regarding a variety of college related points is a more fruitful exercise that simply chancing, and by giving one’s stats one still gets some insight on what schools are within reach, possibly. A wild theory, I know.</p>

<p>Oh, and BTW, contrary to your assertion, the OP did ask for suggestions. That is what I gave him.</p>

8

<p>Are you serious?</p>

<p>Yes, there are many schools that strictly adhere to a 4.0 system. There are also many schools that choose to add .5 to a students weighted GPA for honors/APs, as there are schools that add .3; there are schools that choose to use the 6.0 system, adding a full 2 points for AP classes, and 1 point for Honors; there are schools that decide to use the 100 point system; there are schools that choose to abandon a numeric system altogether.</p>

<p>What I’m trying to communicate to you here is that there are many discrepancies between the High Schools in this country when it comes to GPA calculation. With a student’s transcript, which is a list of the grades he/she has gotten in all of the classes he/she has taken, in case you didn’t know, you can derive his/her weighted and unweighted GPA. Just because the school elects to not calculate and disclose its students’ weighted averages does not mean that these averages do not exist.</p>

<p>Besides, the rest of your rhetoric is as faulty as your comprehension of the college admissions process. Nobody has ever argued that every single post in this forum should be taken seriously; there are obviously posters that are misinformed, whose opinions are generally lacking in experience and merit. It is to the OP’s discretion that these posts must be discarded. It’s almost ironic that you would bring this up. Nonetheless, acknowledging this does not negate the legitimacy of posters that are more in line with what was previously mentioned in this thread, posters that are capable of offering reasonable and effective insight.</p>

<p>And finally, the degree in which you can consistently point out such obvious information deserves a resounding round of applause. I was under the impression that the OP was required to follow all the advice given to him, because that’s the way advice works, right?</p>

<p>Your contributions are really great; you do as great a job as Yahoo Answers.</p>

9

<p>LOL, you make no sense. You said in post #6 “…as long as someone has a transcript, they have both an unweighted and a weighted GPA.” His school doesn’t give weighted GPA’s, so he doesn’t have one. I can also recalculate his grades on a 3.0 scale. So what? But you miss the point anyway. RedRoses was speculating that the 3.5 might be weighted, I pointed out that his school didn’t report weighted. You went off on some unrelated tangent. Pretty much as you did in all your posts.</p>

<p>Just to make it clear how uncomprehending you were, here is the sequence:</p>

<p>RedRoses (to the OP) - “…if those are weighted GPAs…”</p>

<p>Me - “The OP specifically stated that the school doesn’t weight GPA.” That means they don’t report it and he wasn’t citing it.</p>

<p>You -“…as long as someone has a transcript, they have both an unweighted and a weighted GPA.” Huh??? What does that have to do with it? I was simply pointing out that it was clear the OP was giving an unweighted GPA.</p>

<p>Great contribution on your part.</p>

10

<p>Tangents are what they are, but what’s worse is that you still are incapable of understanding what I am saying. Yes, we have already agreed and gotten past the fact that his school chooses to not calculate its students’ weighted GPAs. However, as long as he’s gotten a grade in any class, he will have both a weighted and unweighted GPA. Wrap your head around how these two are derived from numbers, which, once again, means that they will exist regardless of whether or not they are disclosed. Please, return to the Tulane boards, where you can at least pretend to seem intelligent.</p>

11

<p>I always understood what you were saying, it just had nothing to do with the discussion. The subject was never whether you can calculate a weighted GPA from the grades reported. It was a totally irrelevant observation. Talk about stating the obvious!! The OP clearly said he was reporting UW, so why did you even bring it up? It did not address any question that had been asked or any point that had been made, and it added nothing to the discussion. You can go back somewhere also, I am sure.</p>

12

<p>Everything that was brought up in this thread was done so to systematically dispel myths and falsehoods that you so fervently perpetuated; better to have taken this thread in a slightly off-topic direction than to have the OP’s head filled with terrible advice.</p>

13

<p>Uh-huh. That certainly avoids answering the direct question, but then you can’t since you know you didn’t read carefully to begin with.</p>

14

<p>What? It’s outrageous that you can still be posting in this thread, when everything that you said has either been proven to be wholly fallacious or was entirely BS to begin with.</p>

15

<p>Only in your mind.</p>

16

<p>I’m an URM? </p>

<p>BTW, what I’ve noticed about CMC is that they routinely (but not always) turn down those with 4.0’s and high SAT/ACT scores when they lack leadership. For most if not ALL of my ec’s, I have had a substantial amount of leadership vested in them along with the clearly evident theme of community impact throughout all my activities. </p>

<p>Also, I honestly looked through every single school in the Collegeboard’s blue book and picked out the ones that appealed to me. It was basically the list I had above along with Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Ohio State, Trinity College, and University of Oregon. I visited these 15 schools and took off one’s I knew I couldn’t get into (Princeton, Yale, and Stanford). Then removed schools that I didn’t identify with/like during my campus visits (Ohio, Trinity, and U of O). What I’m left with is my ideal list of schools. Even if I get denied everywhere except for UW-M I’d still be inexplicably happy. My top choice by FAR is CMC and I plan on applying ED II there so that they can see my first semester senior year grades. Along with my retake of the ACT.</p>

17

<p>Wow, you have done thorough research. OK, then your list is what it is, and I even more think that people giving their opinions of your chances won’t mean anything. Just apply, and see what happens. I will say that your list is nicely balanced and you should get in more places than just UW-M. Since you should definitely get offers from at least a couple of those schools, any judgement by us CC people on your chances at each school changes nothing and helps you not at all.</p>

<p>As far as the URM issue, are you not African-American? Admittedly it is an assumption based on your statements in post #1, but you strongly led us to believe that. If you are, then yes AA (males especially) are underrepresented minorities at universities, and especially at top universities.</p>

18

<p>I’m Afghani/Iranian.</p>

19

<p>OK, I would think that still is very much a minority group at most US universities. Under the theory that schools want students from a variety of cultural/ethnic backgrounds (and I think their own statements make it clear that is true), I cannot imagine that either Afghani or Iranian is highly represented these days. Before the Iranian revolution, there were a fair number of Iranian students studying in the USA. Not so much any more, I don’t think. But maybe someone else has hard numbers. Bottom line, I think it might give you a slight push in the positive column, if you are borderline somewhere.</p>

20

<p>^I believe that he qualifies as being Asian. </p>

<p>EDIT: Nevermind, I’m not sure exactly what the demographic quotas are, but the Common App puts Middle Eastern students within the White ethnic group.</p>