I have no real understanding of how college admissions works in general, only the general info I have gathered for guiding my own children as their GC.
On another thread, a high school student attending Stuyvesant insisted that bc she attended there that she didn’t need to take the SAT again with a CR+M of 1390 (670/720) and 3.6 unweighted GPA with hopes for “Reaches: U Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, lehigh, UC Berkeley.”
I am wondering if her perception of admissions is accurate. Is a 1390 for a Stuyvesant student so innately competitive for UChicago, CMU, Northwestern, and Berkeley that a student could absolutely dismiss taking the test a 2nd time?
(Just wondering if my perceptions have become completely skewed bc my kids have to have high scores for merit $$. A 1390 would automatically mean my kids would need to retest. The OP of that discussion stated she needed merit $$ as well, but dismissed any suggestion that her stats were less than extremely competitive.)
Many competitive universities like to consider how the student did versus their peers, and class rigor. A student in the top 25% at Stuyvesant, may be much more competitive than a student in the top 5% of a rural high school in Florida.
However, all of the kids accepted at schools like UChicago and Berkeley are highly competitive. The 25% percentile at UChicago is 720/715. I wouldn’t feel good about scoring 50 points below that percentile in CR. These schools also rarely give merit (they give much more in need based aid), so being in the top 75% isn’t good enough…let alone the bottom 25%.
I wouldn’t say its a guarantee of getting into all the schools mentioned but, yes, I’d predict the student would get into 1 or 2, no problem. The Naviance charts for Stuyvesant are going to look very different than the ones for the average public high school. Stuyvesant has little to no grade inflation and those are scores are decent. However, all bets are off if the student is applying for CS or Engineering, given the competition.
I would hope the student would be smart enough to have some safeties both in terms of admissions and aid.
Unless she has a hook, I don’t think she’s getting into her reaches - though at Carnegie Mellon, the one I know best, the department stats vary wildly so she might have a chance at one of them. The GPA may well be okay because it’s Stuyvesant. My general sense is kids are getting into the right level schools for them. So if you are deciding whether to attend a magnet and be in the top 25% or the local high school and be in the top 10% at the end of four years your college prospects are likely to be very similar.
I can certainly understand the GPA being viewed differently because it’s Stuyvesant, but the SAT scores? If anything, wouldn’t one expect a student there to do better on the SAT?
Agree with @mathmom that if she is hooked, she likely will get into some of them, and the Stuy name could help. But if she is unhooked, those SAT scores will keep her out.
I had the same reaction as Consolation. I would expect SAT to be higher than the average from a Stuy student. Think about it - these schools always report high median and mean test scores in the profiles. A slightly lower unweighted GPA may be compensated but that’s when class rank comes into play.
I can see your point, @Consolation, but colleges are trying to determine who can come in and get the work done and colleges know that test scores aren’t always the best indicator of that nor that every student wants to spend a chunk of their high school life obsessing about standardized test scores. Surviving Stuyvesant, a known HS to the colleges in terms of academic rigor, carries weight with admissions committees. Test scores are more valuable to them when weighing the academic record of a school less known to the college or one where there might be grade inflation and/or less rigorous academic standards. I do think there is a lower bar for kids coming from more prestigious schools.
I would also imagine her college counselor is a good one.
The average score for Stuyvesant is CR: 678, M: 737. Thus, her scores are close to the high school’s average. If she has access to Naviance, yes, I think she could be right. I found a list of college results for the class of 2015, but I won’t link to it, as it seems to be a student effort. If you search for “Stuyvesant high school college results” you should find it.
I wouldn’t call it “lower standards.” After all, colleges do keep track of how students from particular high schools do once enrolled. It would be more accurate to say that a student with average grades at Stuyvesant is better prepared for rigorous college study than someone with high grades from a less demanding school, or than a student who’s done a lot of test prep for the SAT, & that Stuyvesant’s grading system is a better indicator of talent than standardized testing.
Thank you for the thoughts. I guess my reaction was more along the lines the posters who expressed that with that educational background you would expect higher scores.
Do you believe the edge for admissions extends to being competitive for merit $$ (at the schools which actually have merit scholarships)?
A 3.6 at a school like Stuyvesant (or a multitude of highly regarded hs) is definitely worth more than a higher gpa from a less rigorous hs. Since the hs transcript is the most important element of an application, a kid from a top high school can get admitted with lower test scores than a kid from a not so top high school due to the rigor of the high school. That being said, the poster is by no means a sure thing at any of the schools on her list except Lehigh, and even there she needs to demonstrate some interest
