<p>Any advice for my daughter who wants to go to UPENN</p>
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<p>My daughter who is going into her senior year of High School is interested in UPENN. She loved the school when we visted and is interested in engineering. . Could you chance her? Here is her info: weighted GPA 103% unweighted about 98% . Our school doesnt use a 4.00 gpa but both grades are a 4.00 at least. ACT composite was 33. Our school doesnt rank but she is somewhere between the top 5 to 10 % of her class according to our guidance dept. She scored low on her SAT-1990 but plans on retaking. Should she just send ACt score if her SAT doesnt go up? Also should she retake ACT? She has taken all AP glasses offered by our school and honors when school didnt offer AP. Has a passion for robotics and has been in club since 9th grade. She created a manual and constitution for the club and hopes it will be added to after she graduates. She has travelled all over East coast with the club to various competitions where they have won many awards. She has held a leadership role in that club as well as in The National Honor Society, Math Honor Society, English Honor Society, Science Honor Society(all service and academic based clubs) She is also in the international Club and the School Newspaper. She is a Girl Scout and is just finishing up her Gold Award( equal to the Boys Scouts eagle award). Her project is a concert to raise money for the local food bank. She has a part time job in a local ice cream store and she also tutors kids. She is an active member of our church and has been an altar server for nine years. She plays the piano an has partcipated in NYSSMA for the past 6 years and has scored outstanding on all of her performances. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>She sounds wonderful. If I had read CC before my S applied, I would have been very discouraged. There is so much more to college admissions than scores. Hopefully she can write some great essays. My S had similar scores, was an Eagle, and not as much ECs and was accepted. Other students with almost perfect scores, better ECs were not accepted. Who actually knows what makes them decide? Hopefully she visits, likes it (or another college) and is accepted. Good luck!</p>
<p>you will get the same response if you post this here, on princeton’s board, or on tuft’s board. she has the gpa and the act is good enough. everything else is subjective, and that’s true with most applicants b/c gpa/board scores only make you eligible.</p>
<p>She has the stat to get accepted. If Penn is her #1 choice and financial aid is not a big issue, it would be wise to apply ED. Try to show as much interest and enthusiasm for Penn in her application and essays. For example, she may try to study up on various Penn robotic activities which are pretty active and incorporate that in one of her essays stating how she would like to contribute to the effort. Also stress her leadership record, I remember seeing a letter from the engineering school focusing on that in accepted students. I think a female applicant to SEAS gets slight boost also.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t worry about retaking the SAT unless she has reason to believe she’ll do a lot better. Penn (and every other school) accepts either and just looks at the better of the two if you took both. It sounds your daughter (like my son) does better on the ACT so I would concentrate on that. It’s really a tossup whether to take the ACT again. One professional college counselor I talked to claimed that 34 significantly improved your chances over 33, but I really don’t know if this is true. On the other hand, Penn claims to take into account when someone takes the test just once, rather than trying over and over to improve their score, and give a boost for that.</p>
<p>Also, Penn expects you to submit every score from every sitting for every test that you take, so they want you to submit your SAT even if your ACT is clearly better. They say the only use the best score. Of course there is no way (that I know of) for them to find out you didn’t report a score, and I’m sure many people don’t submit them all.</p>
<p>It has been speculated that one way a school can find out is for the school to buy a mailing list of students of certain score range. This is done all the time to get a list of prospective students for mass mailing from the school. If a student name shows up on a list and the student reported no SAT score, then the obvious conclusion can easily be reached. Various variations of this technique can be done to find the lower scores that are not reported by the student. In theory, this sounds like a plausible thing to do but I really don’t believe that this actually happens.</p>
<p>The main thing is not to fixate too much on one score. One bad SAT score when you already had 33 in ACT and an all-around A student with great accomplishments in and out of the classrooms is not going to be significant in bigger scheme of things.</p>