I have an overall GPA throughout high school of around 3.8-3.85 and junior and senior year I am taking all IB courses (doing the diploma). Haven’t taken the SAT yet but I can probably score in the 1300-1350 range. I have pretty good extracurricular activities-- sports, music, volunteering, fundraising, youth group involvement. Does anyone know how much colleges favor the IB if they do at all? And does class rank matter? I’m somewhere in the middle of my grade in terms of academics probably but my school is pretty competitive compared to most. Also, I’m looking at some of the following schools, not sure if they would be realistic for me to get into:
I’m a senior doing the IB Diploma too and I’ve constantly been asking myself the same question, just how valuable is IB? I’m realizing now that it actually is super valuable because it raises your GPA a lot, similar to AP but in my school, AP wasn’t implemented. And also IB concentrates a lot on outside activities like CAS and EE and is quite focused on time management and colleges do consider that. Class Rank matters as well, once you take the SAT, you’ll have to make a collegeboard account on which you can check up stats on colleges and in that, one of the things they include is the percentage of applicants within the top 10% of their class, top 50% and so on… Additionally, take your SAT as soon as possible! I thought I’d do fine and all but I didn’t and was super devasted and when I took it again, I only went up by ten points. Thankfully, I still had time before college apps to take the ACT and I did well on that (thank God!).
And one last thing, I know you may have heard that colleges don’t give credit for IB that much cause that’s what I heard. You need like a 5+ on the exams to qualify in most schools so I suggest you look at schools in Colorado too. There’s this rule in Colorado that all colleges must give students credit for IB courses so hopefully, that’ll help. For the colleges you’ve listed, I know most of them but don’t know their requirements that all but from what I do know, I think you have a good chance at getting into Michigan.
^Yes, there’s a website out there that shows what the increase in acceptance rate is with the IB diploma, I’m sorry I don’t have it anymore. There were a few schools where the percentage was bumped up 10-20%. I know there were a handful on the East Coast because that is the only place we looked at. Also look at what schools give credit, for which classes, and the required point score. Most of them will only credit the general requirements, not major requirements.
While we don’t believe the IB diploma was instrumental in improving D’s chances for admittance at the schools where she applied, she was very well prepared for college, both in time management and in rigor, so don’t think that all your efforts are for nothing, they will come in quite handy when you see how some students have a hard time adjusting to the work load.
I go to Villanova now and I got in with a 3.7 GPA (3.8 my junior and senior years), 33 ACT and I was an IB diploma candidate. I do think that it helped me get in, but I will say that I got my diploma and got 0 credits. I was able to test out of all but 1 semester of spanish. I would recommend being an IB candidate but don’t stress about it when you get into schools.
At most upper level colleges an important criteria is rigor of HS schedule. An IB track normally shows high rigor in the school.
Just be careful with your list. You have all but 1 state flagship. The criteria for OSS is normally way higher than the total. Also, many on your list give little to no aid for OSS. They can be very expensive.