<p>How important are extra curriculars/essays/recs for Tufts compared to GPA/SAT? I'm wondering this because what if you have good recs/extra curriculars/essays (hopefully, about the essays) and a very high SAT but the GPA is very low? Because of the low GPA, does this very drastically affect your chances at Tufts?</p>
<p>How low is low?</p>
<p>REALLY bad. Like 3.2-3.3 UW, 3.7 W (only good thing is a big upward trend and hard classes).</p>
<p>SAT is 2300+ though. </p>
<p>And good extracurriculars, recs, etc. </p>
<p>Does having this bad of a GPA pretty much almost automatically screen you out?</p>
<p>Go onto the tufts website and type in Common Data Set to look at all of their stats.</p>
<p>I tried and this factbook came up:</p>
<p>I didn't look through all of it obviously but the SAT scores were there, not the GPAs though. Am I looking at the wrong thing?</p>
<p>wow. the acceptances to enrollments ratio is interesting on that.</p>
<p>for engineering, 1951 applied > 636 accepted > 188 enrolled,</p>
<p>overall, they said only about 30% of all applicants enroll at Tufts. i think this is where ED help comes into play (or maybe my wishful thinking lol)</p>
<p>also, for engineering, 2/3 of all students are men (too be expected)</p>
<p>Extracurriculars, essays, and recs are always important to Tufts. But the lower your GPA and test scores, the more important the essays and recs. If you think about it, it simply makes sense.</p>
<p>So if the biggest weakness is the GPA but everything else is okay (and the SAT score is above the average for Tufts), there's still a slim chance?</p>
<p>The engineering stat is interesting... I guess that means if you're a girl you have a better chance at getting in on an engineering major (not that it's still not difficult)?</p>
<p>Maybe it means your school is really hard and practices crazy grade deflation? Or do you think it's just because you didn't work too hard in your classes...? It's your gut feeling, most likely.</p>
<p>If people from your school have gone to Tufts before, then I think the respective regional officer will know what to expect. I mean, if everyone from your school who has applied to Tufts has comparatively lower GPAs than kids from other schools, then I'm sure Tufts would know of it. I mean that insanely high SAT doesn't match up with the GPA... so the adcom will probably raise an eyebrow and check it out, especially if your essays are compelling enough. </p>
<p>However if you wish, I think some students have their counselors write supplemental letters if there is anything you want the adcom to know (that will be relevant and useful to your application).</p>
<p>Or, perhaps there is a good reason for your low GPA (i.e. family/personal problems... health issues...)? If so, that would be VERY important for the adcom to know.</p>
<p>Just my rationale :)</p>
<p>Neethus is offering sound advice. At S's HS, there are no weighted grades, but a 3.7 would be a very good GPA and it is my understanding that the AdComs are various highly selective schools already know this. However, if it was a maturity problem or other issue, it is important for you to make this known or your GC to make this known in some way. Upward trends are very important and I guess it depends on if you just had a really weak freshman year or you totally dropped the ball middle of sophomore year (which is typically a sign of too much partying or other irresponsibility). Follow?</p>
<p>Another question - does this GPA of a 3.3 or so include lots of C's and A's so it levels out to a 3.3? Or is it mostly straight B's? If it's the former, I would say it looks worse... unless the C's are in classes like Phys Ed and whatever.</p>
<p>Also, I don't know if you have class rank, but that might factor into the decision. Your SAT's are high so that shows you're smart (or at least a good test taker) and if you have a high class rank, Tufts will know that the school is hard, and you are applying yourself. Granted, if you go to a huge public school they'll probably expect you to have high class rank. Anyway, basically it's really hard to get A's in some schools, so if that's your school and Tufts knows that, then your fine. Otherwise, it's hit and miss.</p>
<p>Thanks everybody. I go to a really competitive public school, and yea some of the courses here are very hard (example: some of the AP courses here are harder than the courses offered at a nearby community college that's one of the top CC's). </p>
<p>To the GPA question, mostly Bs but 5 Cs =/, all in honors/AP classes (and the same ones both semester =/). </p>
<p>A REALLY drastic upward trend as in like around 3.0 GPAs for 3 semesters (average) and then a basically 4.0 for the last semester. </p>
<p>Also one of the classes that I got a C in (2 Cs both semesters while taking the honors course soph year, 1 C at the AP level junior year), I got a 5 on the AP exam and close to 800 on the SAT II... it's a really hard course though... in the past people from our school who have got into Harvard, MIT etc would have straight As and maybe like 1-2 Bs.. and those Bs were in this class. Also got 5s on all the AP exams I've taken. </p>
<p>I think there is one person from our school attending Tufts this year (class of 08).</p>
<p>When I was in middle school, there was this awesome game I played (until my parents thought it was distracting me from school) called [SimTower[/url</a>]. The object of the game, essentially, was to build as big and as tall a commercial tower as you could with the goal of reaching 5-Star status. Doing this meant meeting certain preset conditions - reaching 100 floors, for example. As you built, you used different types of rents/sales/ammenities/services to create revenue and attract visitors and tenants. There were many, many ways to do this. You could focus on leasing office space, or put in lots of hotel rooms, or shops, or restaurants.</p>
<p>But at a certain point, you needed to have some combination of all the different pieces to reach 5 Stars.</p>
<p>Gaining admittance is kind of like playing SimTower (only generally less fun). Your application needs to reach a certain point of strength for that admittance. Your academics are the foundation; the stronger your academics are, the closer you are to 5-Stars right from the beginning. If you follow the analogy, a solid student with good testing might be have 2.5 Stars: 40 floors already in place, a couple good restaurants already in the lobby.. A valedictorian with perfect ACTs would be 4-Stars, looking for the fifth: 80 floors, a ballroom, skylounge on the 50th floor. (No one is admitted based on academics alone). Your essays/recs/extracurriculars/perspective/interests/background are how you build up your application the rest of the way. Those are the pieces that allow you to layer in the rest of who you are.</p>
<p>There are, however, some students who apply and who cannot convince us that they are prepared to be successful at Tufts. Fortunately, this is a really small portion of the applicant pool. Unless we come across information that allows us to look at academics a different way, we will not admit those students regardless of the essays. No one benefits if we admit students who are not prepared for the Tufts classrooms. </p>
<p>I was mostly just excited to talk about SimTower, so I ask: did this make any sense?
[url=<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=wmyvW26hzGU%5DYouTube">http://youtube.com/watch?v=wmyvW26hzGU]YouTube</a> - Sim Tower (PC) preview](<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower%5DSimTower%5B/url">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower) Yay for SimTower videos!</p>
<p>First of all.. when someone ties together fifth grade and playing video games, I can only conclude...I am getting REALLY old! The equiv. for me would be something like pong where you put various overlays on your TV to play different games (even though they were all played the exact same way).</p>
<p>This said, Simtower is a great analogy and is that a really old AD and/or how come they don't have that today? </p>
<p>So let me ask this: How does this analogy shift (or does it) to include parents (here on CC and in general) talk about "gaming" the system of admissions. The school of thought at S's school is that to package a kid makes him look.. well, packaged. Others work with the professional college placement specialist which seems like a euphemism for something with a larger appetite for your wallet. However, their skills are supposed to be their ability to know what to glean from a kid to give them, say those elusive 20 floors. Since tests and academics are fairly straight forward (especially if you have a familiarity with the HS), How do adcoms look at the packaging (or lack thereof) of these added star groups?</p>
<p>PS... how's it going?</p>
<p>That was a great post. Not only was it a good analogy, but it reminded me of how awesome SimTower was...</p>
<p>Yoot</a> Saito FTW.</p>
<p>Back to the questions:
[quote]
So let me ask this: How does this analogy shift (or does it) to include parents (here on CC and in general) talk about "gaming" the system of admissions. The school of thought at S's school is that to package a kid makes him look.. well, packaged. Others work with the professional college placement specialist which seems like a euphemism for something with a larger appetite for your wallet. However, their skills are supposed to be their ability to know what to glean from a kid to give them, say those elusive 20 floors. Since tests and academics are fairly straight forward (especially if you have a familiarity with the HS), How do adcoms look at the packaging (or lack thereof) of these added star groups?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>If you could query admissions officers (and get totally honest reactions) I think you'd hear a mix of different responses. What I can give you will be limited to my experience with the Tufts process. </p>
<p>Packaged voices tend to be plentiful in our pool. For the most part, all that packaging looks and sounds the same. I know, from my own college application, the kind of pressure there is to talk about how much you value diversity, or want to save the world, or how much 'passion' you have. These are all important qualities, but they should appear organically in an application. And the truth is that simply having these qualities is not enough: your application should leave me with a sense of your intellectual potential. Nuance and subtlety are perhaps the most effective way to demonstrate that potential. But after going the process myself and now talking with many 'admissions consultants' as a profession, I know that most of that 'Packaging' encourages students to think of admissions officers as fools who need to be spoon fed exactly what we want to hear. Nuance is eschewed as risky, and an applicant-centered approach is rejected as dangerous.</p>
<p>This is the answer I give every single time anyone asks me about college essays: tell me what YOU want to say. The application is about you, not about me. </p>
<p>I suspect its a perspective derived from being on the 'youthful' side of the spectrum, and working in an office with a median age of about 30 years. As an office, we're close enough to the current culture of the admissions process, and to the current voices of 17 year olds. There's a difference between a smart 35 year old voice and a brilliant 17 year old voice, even if that 17 year old is remarkably mature. At times, that difference is subtle, but I can generally still hear it. It's awfully hard to trust the insight given in an essay if you harbor suspicions around the voice that wrote it.</p>
<p>There are some excellent 'consultants' out there, who want to get to know their clients so they can encourage them to find their own path and understand their own potency, and I understand the validity to that. Without facetiousness, I recognize how hard it can be to come to terms with ones own gifts, and having an outside perspective can be useful. </p>
<p>
[quote]
PS... how's it going?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Really well! I'm still sane, but I might be whistling a different tun at the end of March.</p>
<p>I appreciate your impressions. And I am slightly freaking out that my S did not show his true depth in any of his applications.... but of course, his counselor assures me his applications are strong. Thing is.. we, as a family, really bought into the fact that this was HIS process and not ours, and so pretty much stayed out of it beyond formatting a resume (that he wouldn't even consider expanding on). Of course this was BEFORE I found this website and saw how much time, money and energy other parents put into the process. I am slightly concerned that his humility (for lack of a better word) will surely work against him through this process, and I can only hope that his teacher recs and other aspects of his application speak to all of the things he thinks coming from himself look arrogant. We've spent so much time encouraging him to be a team player, he really doesn't know any other way. He is evolving into a man of true character who leads by example and not words on a page. Give him an analytical essay and his brilliance is clear. Give him the opportunity to tell you why he is brilliant and he becomes a mute! :)</p>
<p>And as I write this, I realize that while everyone else may still be sane, I might be slowly going off the deep end!!!!</p>
<p>Don't drown yet, Modadunn! You have months to get through! And all will work out...it really always does.</p>
<p>Did your son write/create something for the Tufts optional prompts? My guess is that those off-beat prompts do a lot to bring out that 17-year-old brilliance in a less-packaged way.</p>
<p>Check out the thread on <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tufts-university/446146-contextualizing-sats.html#post1061813833%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tufts-university/446146-contextualizing-sats.html#post1061813833</a> to see how I feel about "less packaged" applications (it's towards the end).</p>
<p>Don't let CC's self-selective pool throw you in the deep end. The decision may go either way, but trust us to be thoughtful in how we make that decision.</p>