I’m a white dude from Illinois with legacy who just applied ED to Penn.
Stats:
GPA: 3.81 unweighted, at a college-preparatory school (all classes are automatically honors) with no class ranking system
ACT: 35, splits for English, Math, Reading, Science respectively are 35, 33, 36, 35
My Subject Test Scores: Literature 690, Math 720
EC’s: Varsity soccer, Camp Counselor, Senior Class Secretary-Treasurer, I also work for my 90 year old neighbor, and I play trumpet
My teacher recommendations are, if I had to guess, pretty solid but nothing special.
My essays, on the other hand, seem to be great, the college counselor at my school told me I “have a gift” for writing, even my strict dad who used to read grad school apps was impressed
I applied to CAS for an English major.
What are my chances of getting in?
I really wanna know and I can’t wait for that Dec deadline, lmao.
Even at schools that don’t officially rank, the schools provide a report to colleges along with every transcript they send out that provides grade distributions on classes, AP tests, SAT subject tests, the SAT and ACT. Between the report, and other students who apply or have applied previously from your HS, colleges get a pretty good idea where you rank.
The only school where we know the actual legacy admit rate is Harvard (due to the data released as a result of the anti-Asian admissions bias lawsuit) where the admit rate was 33%. If UPenn accepts legacies at a similar rate (and no particular reason to think they don’t) and ignoring your stats for a moment, you have around a one in three chance.
Your ACT is at the 75th percentile for UPenn - probably a good place to be - your subject test scores are lower than most would think optimal, and where your GPA puts you relative to others at your school is unclear.
You’ll find out in December if you were in the one third of legacy applicants who made it, or the two-thirds who don’t.