<p>Well it's been a while since I posted here, and so allow me to post my situation:</p>
<p>After graduating from HS, I have fixed my grade. For those who don't know, I ran into a crisis during senior year involving a failing grade due to overexcessive tardies, which I truly feel made a huge impact on my chances of getting in some of the colleges that I applied to. But whatever, point is, I left all of that behind and fixed that "F" to a 97% through an independent course. </p>
<p>Now, in order to get that grade fixed and still have it apply for college, I had to take a gap year since the day I could get that grade fixed was past most, if not all college admission deadlines. And besides a gap year was not only encouraged by my parents, but I felt that it would be an interesting idea also...and besides, I am 1 year younger than my class, so a gap year would essentially cancel out the age difference.</p>
<p>Anyways, for my gap year, I plan on spending the summer in China to study with a group (leaving in 2 days, arriving back to the states on August 20th). After China, I stay in the states from September - December to focus on college admissions and scholarships. After I'm done with that, I plan to go to Korea to fix up my language fluency and maybe enter a few programs. </p>
<p>Which leaves me with a few questions that I hope the CCers here can answer:</p>
<p>1) I took my SAT Is and IIs already (June '05, October '05, November '05 [SAT II]), but I've been hearing mixed responses on whether I am required to take it once more. I tried looking at collegeboard.com but I couldn't get a definite answer. Anyone know whether I should take the SATs once more (I took it twice already, and the SAT IIs once)?</p>
<p>2) If it's a gap year, how come only 2 months of my year counts? Was it intended for me to take an entire year off and enter college Fall 2008 instead of 2007? </p>
<p>3) How much of an impact does attendance have on an application? </p>
<p>4) <em>bit off topic</em> Is common application better than regular application?</p>
<p>5) How should I handle teacher recommendations since I already graduated HS? </p>
<p>Thanks in advance for answering my questions!</p>