<p>10 chars.......</p>
<p>Where do you want to go to college?</p>
<p>I wondering that too</p>
<p>Umm, if you're looking at Ivies, of course they matter.</p>
<p>If you're looking at University of Nebraska, who cares?</p>
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Umm, if you're looking at Ivies, of course they matter.
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<p>Why ?</p>
<p>English matters a lot in fields such as engineering and science. A scientist/engineer must be persuasive and skilled in writing because a great part of their research/projects come from proposals for grant money. Researchers have to show that the research that they're doing is important, and one of the ways is through presentations, papers, etc. It's not just good enough to be technically correct. You have to be able to persuade others that you're right.</p>
<p>What about the reverse - do math grades matter if you are a language person? </p>
<p>I am not sure what adcoms would decide, but in the real world you can always find someone to rewrite your amazing mathematical or scientific research, or at least to edit it. It is the content that counts. If you are a language person, you can always hire someone to do your taxes or whatever numerical tasks are in your way.</p>
<p>I would think that elite schools, in their quest to get the top minds in the world in math and science, would be willing to overlook language grades if the student truly had a compelling list of achievements in his area of expertise.</p>
<p>But how bad are we talking about here? </p>
<p>A would-be math major applying to a top math school will be competing for admission spots with lots of other high school students who have strong math scores and math-related extracurricular achievements. If the application is to a college that doesn't fill its whole class with math majors, there will be limited space in the entering class for the would-be math majors who are admitted. If the college has to decide which 100 applicants to admit to have a yield resulting in 60 new math majors, but there are 1,000 math-liking applicants, something still has to distinguish the math-likers from one another. And that something just might having strong reading and writing ability AS WELL AS strong math ability. </p>
<p>I would be the first to acknowledge that sometimes high school English classes have little relationship to reading and writing ability. But that would be a reason to do something related to English outside of high school classes--maybe join a debate team or enter a writing contest--and not a reason to blow off the English classes. The really, truly selective colleges expect students to challenge themselves, so while a grade of B in AP English might not be a deal-breaker, perhaps a grade of C in a regular English class would be.</p>