<p>I currently attend one of the top high schools in Sydney (<10% acceptance rate) and am worried about my grades at school.</p>
<p>At my school we are given rank in each course and a grade/100 that is based on the averages of all of our exams. The thing is, my school purposely gives really hard exams in some subjects (such as chemistry and physics) in order to overprepare us for the end-of-year exams everyone in the state has to take. For example, in chemistry, often the top score for an exam given by the school is below 90%, but over 60% of the students get over 90% on our end-of-year exams. Furthermore, since our school is so selective, some of my rankings in subjects are not the greatest (eg. I was ranked 26/77 in chemistry but got an 800 in the Chem SATII). </p>
<p>Also, since our school doesn't have a lot of students applying for college in America, I fear my guidance counselor will not be able to properly explain my school's situation.</p>
<p>Will top colleges look at my low scores on my transcripts and automatically reject me?</p>
<p>Talk to you GC and see if they have given school reports before. The acceptance rate criteria and any school ranking can be included for context. Will your end of year exams or predicted scores be available?</p>
<p>Your SAT and SAT II’s will help tell your story. Many US colleges don’t have ‘automatic rejections’ and instead look at applicants holistically. Sorry I don’t know that much about internationals applying. Try the internationals forum.</p>
<p>Colleges know about a country’s educational system, but you can’t expect them to know about each school in each country. So if the colleges you’re applying to have come to your high school and recruited from there, then yes they know about it. In all other cases assume they don’t.
No matter what, your guidance counselor will have to write a School Profile. In it, it’ll be essential to describe the selection process to be admitted to your high school (and if there’s a feeder jr high school that’s selective, the selection process for that school too.) In addition, correlation between grading at your school and national exams is a crucial item to provide - ie, do students who get 80 at your school get 85 or 90 on the national exam, or 80 or 75? In addition, your counselor has to indicate what percentage students get grades 90+, 87+, 85+, 80+, 75+, 70+, 60+, etc in your school and nationally, whether any qualify to national competitions or awards, what percentage go on to university (“4 year universities” can be any school that requires a specific qualification to enter, “2 year universities” indicate schools that are open enrollment, ie anyone who’s 18 can enter.)
This will be included in the Common Application when your counselor clicks on “International School”. S/he will also have to give your results for the lower-secondary exams and predicted results for upper-secondary exams (for example, your Year 10 results or your SSCE predicted/actual results).</p>