<p>I got a B in
Chemistry 1H</p>
<p>I've taken the Chemistry subject test already and I got an 800 on that.</p>
<p>Would the 800 make the B not look as bad?</p>
<p>If I were on an adcom, which I am not… </p>
<p>a Chem SATII 800 would make me think that you came from a rigorous school that does not engage in grade inflation (particularly since you pointed it out in your application.) When top kids in top schools get Bs, one would add a premium on all the other Bs on your transcript, nudging them upward. I.E. rigorous curriculum which has prepared you to be a success in college, which is what colleges say they want.</p>
<p>On the flip side, a transcript full of As would be discounted as coming from a school with extreme grade inflation if test score were in the 500s. </p>
<p>The kids most likely to crash and burn in college are those who coasted on easy As in High School and then go into shock when faced with real college-level work.</p>
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<p>Conversely, one could also think that you obviously learned the information, but you slacked off on things like homework which dropped you down from an A to a B.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone can project what an adcom is going to think about this one situation in isolation, it really depends on what the rest of your application looks like, what your school profile is, etc.</p>
<p>I think of the SAT Subject Tests as mostly a grade validator. If you good a good GPA and high class rank in HS and come in with superior (750+) SAT IIs, it tends to validate that you really learned something, and therefore that the A is real and the high class rank came in real competition. If you come in with a slightly lower GPA and slightly lower class rank but still stellar SAT IIs, it may suggest that your school grades on a tougher curve and is highly competitive (with lots of top students); or, as someone suggested, it might tend to suggest that you’re capable of getting up for the big test but perhaps have a tendency to slack off over the longer haul. Then I think how it’s interpreted might depend on how other applicants from your HS did; if their GPAs and class ranks are stronger than yours, they’ll jump ahead of you in line for admission. But to the extent adcoms do use SAT IIs to validate HS grades and class ranks, I think they do it somewhat more holistically, looking at all your grades against all your SAT II scores; I don’t think they’ll do a one-for-one correspondence and say, “Well, that B in Chemistry doesn’t look so great, but we’ll overlook it because we see the 800 score on the SAT II Chemistry.” Instead, they say “Hmmm . . . 3 SAT IIs all over 750, what does that tell us about this GPA and class rank?”</p>
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<p>This is where a school’s prestige matters. If the student goes to an elite high school, the B will likely be forgiven, given that school’s history of churning out students capable of handling a college workload. If the school is not considered prestigious, however, then it could very well hurt.</p>
<p>^^^Like I said, it is considered in relation to your school profile and other factors:</p>
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<p>Disagree. If this happened in one class aand your grades are otherwise exceellent, this should be no problem. If you make a habit of scoring well but getting low grades, they won’t be overlooked.</p>
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<p>Perhaps not straight Bs, but if his GPA is decent (3.6+) then I think it can be forgiven. At my school there are quite a few kids with 3.6-3.7 GPAs but they often perform very well on standardized tests, some with SATs in the 2300-2400 range. Nearly all of them are later accepted into top 20 schools.</p>