<p>The moral to all this: whichever school you go to you’d better take the hardest curriculum your school has to offer if you want to have a chance of getting in. Mmouse, if scores of other students took a harder curriculum than you and got a better GPA, that’s why you didn’t get in. It’s true that if you had gone to your regular high school you would have probably easily taken the most rigourous classes and gotten a stronger GPA and come out on top.</p>
<p>My curriculum choices were on the high end according to my counselor. EX: Calculus BC in junior year with a 5.</p>
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<p>Dean J is absolutely right. I was spurred to figure out your scale, and I discovered that a 3.9 is 20th percentile at TJ. While you appear to be a good test taker, you sound extremely underwhelming in more important areas.</p>
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<p>How is this irony?</p>
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<p>Top 16% of applicants from a certain region. I am assuming TJ’s reach is not all of Virginia as your fallacious logic would suggest.</p>
<p>Also, do not be so presumptuous. Not all TJ kids would end up being in the top 10% of their high school, nor would all people in the top 10% get accepted to UVA.</p>
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<p>This sounds not particularly special. Regular high school students do this all the time. I would hope a school focused on science and technology would have more regular instances of this.</p>
<p>I have no idea how you got rejected. I know a girl with a 1780 SAT, white, female, IS and she was waitlisted, not rejected.</p>
<p>Quote:</p>
<p>“My curriculum choices were on the high end according to my counselor. EX: Calculus BC in junior year with a 5.”</p>
<p>MMouse…</p>
<p>LOTS of applicants take BC Calc in their junior year. I would expect nothing less of a TJ student. Question is, what did you take senior year? Did you continue on to Multivariable Calc?</p>
<p>As has already been said, UVa expects you to take the most challenging curriculum that your school has to offer. If BC Calc is as far as you went, I think you have one reason why you weren’t accepted.</p>
<p>Good luck to you.</p>
<p>Sorry, Calculus was just one example. I have enought AP credit to enter UVA as a sophmore, 32 credits.</p>
<p>I for one find this very fishy. I got in with a 3.8 from a noncompetitive public. I had killer test scores too, and am pretty cool…but to scoff at someone because they got what? 2 B’s (3.9/4.0)? throughout HS seems a little ridiculous.</p>
<p>My guess would be that your essays were not stellar. </p>
<p>Either way, you’ll still probably get into somewhere amazing, and it looks like you’ve done a great job throughout HS. Keep your head up!</p>
<p>MMouse, I am sorry you are not in at UVA. Why don’t you go to your best option in April and transfer into UVA after doing very well in your next college? It is a possibility. I know students who really fumbled in high school, and grew up in the first two years of college and completely focused and made it into UVA for their last 2-3 years.</p>
<p>You are talented, so when you pick you school in April…give it all you got. See how things shift after that for you…if you still want to go to Charlottesville or if you want to stay put.</p>
<p>Quote:</p>
<p>“Sorry, Calculus was just one example. I have enought AP credit to enter UVA as a sophmore, 32 credits.”</p>
<p>Not all AP’s are created equal…did you take the most challenging AP’s that TJ offers? Quality means more than quantitiy.</p>
<p>Again, good luck to you.</p>
<p>I have never in my life seen so many people get angry and borderline ignorant for not being accepted into a school.</p>
<p>And what gives you the right to be so arrogant Wolf? Hmmm?</p>
<p>Personally, I do not think that all students at TJ are that much better than students in their base schools. At TJ, there are probably around 80% who should be qualified for VA, and the other 10%~20% should be denied/waitlisted. </p>
<p>And it does not come down to just the SATs. I have just a bit above 2000, but good recs, good extracurriculars, and decent GPA (around average at TJ), so I was accepted. </p>
<p>If you haven’t already, check the website: [Senior</a> Destinations](<a href=“http://tj2010.homelinux.com/home.php]Senior”>http://tj2010.homelinux.com/home.php)</p>
<p>^bahaha I love it when people say hmmmm?</p>
<p>I am not being arrogant. I just can’t believe people are being so rude and ignorant after not being accepted into one of the best universities in the nation. Yes, you had high test scores and high grades, but that doesn’t entitle you an admission into UVA. You have every right to be sad and frustrated, but blaming UVA with comments like, " they are practicing yield protection" or " they hate my high school", just makes you look dumb and childish. </p>
<p>No offense to anyone on the board. I do not mean to be rude or hurtful, but there is a right way to go about rejection and a wrong way. And after admissions were released this week, you can tell that the mood on the UVA board has taken a bitter turn.</p>
<p>Comment like yours are certainly not improving the mood. That’s what these boards are for: to vent. Give them a break.</p>
<p>TJ’s senior classes are now slightly larger than 400 students. Every year recently, UVa accepted well over 100 TJ students (see CC thread “TJHSST '06 Destinations” which reported than 105 students in the class of '06 went to UVa – certainly many more were accepted since 52(!) in that class went to Ivies and another 18 to MIT or Stanford). This 25%+ acceptance rate FAR exceeds the UVa acceptance rate at other NOVA publics – which appears to be closer to 5%. So by no measure could one reasonably argue that UVa “has something against TJ.” In fact, numbers suggest that students living in areas with access to TJ who don’t attend may be disadvantaged in admissions to UVa and other schools because it is presumed that the best and brightest students in the area are at TJ. </p>
<p>TJ students have access to one of the best high school opportunities in the country – incredibly broad course offerings, the best teachers, and classes populated by very bright students, all for FREE. TJ students consistently score well on the SATs and the PSATs. In fact its number of NMSF’s is usually the highest in the country and includes about 40% of the class. That said, as MMouse has now experienced, there are risks associated with attending TJ. For students who qualify to attend, it is much harder to rank in the top of the class at TJ than it would be to rank in the top 5 to 10 students at one’s home school – many of which are very, very good. Over the years the Washington Post has written about how area magnet school students have been disappointed in their college choices compared to the very top students in the other area high schools. I don’t think enough students and their families think about this before they choose to attend schools like TJ. </p>
<p>Come college application time, TJ students below the very top of the class likely write off the Ivies as unattainable and begin to set their sights on the next tier of schools, with a large focus on UVa. But as good as TJ is, it is unreasonable to assume UVa will accept the entire class, even if many of them are NMF’s. Of course, most TJ students end up at wonderful colleges and do well there because of the strong academic backgrounds they bring with them to college. The sting of a UVa denial or waitlisting will dull in time. </p>
<p>One last word on GPA’s. Fairfax County changed its grading scale last year. 90 to 93 is now an A- (3.7 unweighted) instead of the old B+ (3.5), and AP classes get a full bonus point instead of .5. I don’t know how a 3.9 at TJ stacks up under this new scale.</p>
<p>Wow dude, I’m so sorry. I’m a TJ class of 07 and our class was noticing a trend of less and less acceptances from UVA every year. I heard two years before my class they accepted something like 180 students. The year after it was 120 and our year it was like 100. My year, about 75% of the people who had 3.8 and basically everyone with higher got in. I’m really sorry for what happened to you.</p>
<p>LogicP, how is MMouse not better qualified than you? he had 300 more points on SAT, NMF, and a similar GPA (I assume) BUT at the #1 High School in the nation. o___O Also, if anything you’re just proving his point because you have similar stats. So the question is why wasn’t he accepted like you were? possibly because of a negative bias towards TJ? Hmmm?</p>
<p>[Cavalier</a> Daily](<a href=“http://archive.cavalierdaily.com/news/2006/apr/04/by-the-numbers12850/]Cavalier”>http://archive.cavalierdaily.com/news/2006/apr/04/by-the-numbers12850/)
enrolled versus admitted is also something to consider</p>
<p>For those interested here are the stats for TJ class of 09 who applied to UVA according to Naviance.
Applied: 356
Accepted: 244
Enrolled: 107
For accepted students:
Average GPA: 4.1
Average SAT: 1509/2225</p>
<p>With regards to the FCPS grading scale, there is a retroactive 1.0 weight to AP or above, a 0.5 weight for honors, which is what most core classes at TJ are. The average GPA of 4.1 for last year only reflects the 1.0 AP weight and not the honors weight though, so it is lower compared to grades from this year.</p>
<p>Thanks Random, so a good way to see if there’s a bias is to compare the TJ statistics with the general UVA admissions statistics. I don’t know where the best place is to pull out this kind of data, but from [Admission</a>, Facts at a Glance, University of Virginia](<a href=“http://www.virginia.edu/Facts/Glance_Admission.html]Admission”>http://www.virginia.edu/Facts/Glance_Admission.html) and from <a href="http://college./college-1583-University-of-Virginia.html%5B/url%5D">http://college./college-1583-University-of-Virginia.html</a> </p>
<p>Average SAT: 1326
Average GPA (probably not as accurate): 3.93</p>
<p>So why should TJ students have to meet a higher requirement than the average student who was admitted?
Not only that, the TJ course load is much more rigorous than the average school tied in with the many hours of commute. HS students in my area got out of school at 2:05pm when we got out at 3:50 even though I would have to wake up at the same 6:00am as everyone else to catch the bus to goto school everyday. It’s even worse for athletes. I wouldn’t get home until 7:30-8:00pm when I did crew and lacrosse. My point is that the standards within the TJ school are much higher than the typical base school yet we apparently need better stats than everyone else to get into UVA.</p>