<p>omg i hate CC's angry debates...they always end up being personal attacks of other people whom you've never MET and don't know anything about!</p>
<p>The complete opposite. I find them slightly amusing though I try to be the mediator. It's hard with two people lashing out at each other without even...meeting face to face.</p>
<p>@student615: yeah, makes sense. i definitely expanded my safety list after coming here. :)</p>
<p>yeah </p>
<p>now i'm paranoid about not having enough safeties.. eek !!</p>
<p>Don't worry.</p>
<p>If you know how you stand as far as schedule difficulty, grades, test scores and ECs, your safeties will be of a higher standard than the schmuck in your Honors Foreign Language class who slept his way through school and to a 2.5.</p>
<p>Make sure you know the difference between a reach, a fallback and a safety. The 4-tier system makes many a Ivy rejects happy. Otherwise you end up at a school with a subpar campus life with poor grad school options.</p>
<p>You're from SoCal (unfortunately, NoCal seems to have all the good schools like Berkeley and Stanford) just like me. If you know you're Ivy material, UCLA and Berkeley are reasonable fall-back options, as would be UCSB and UCSD. A good out of state public fall back would be NYU, UNC-Chapel Hill, UVirginia or UMich-Ann Arbor. A good private school fallback would be Fordham or TCU. Any good small LAC fallbacks would be St. John's, Reed, Haverford, Colgate or Swarthmore.</p>
<p>For alot of people you know, your local CSU is a good safety or fallback, but if you want to go to a top grad school (Ivy, Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, the first two UCs I mentioned) it'll be hard to get in if you graduate from a CSU. A safety for you would be one of the mid to lower end UCs (Irvine and UCSD being closer to the top, Riverside and Merced at the bottom). Rules designate that all seniors in the top 10% of their graduating class get into a UC, but that rule excludes the top 4 I mentioned earlier. For those, it's anyones game. But since the lower ones aren't as high in prestige, you'll get in assuming you're rejected from any of the higher end schools you applied to and need a safety. Other safeties might be less renowned state schools like UAlabama and UOregon. Make sure you know how grad schools see the quality of students graduating from the undergrad programs of such schools before you apply to out-of-state safeties like those.</p>
<p>In the end, I can sum it up like this: life will go on and you'll still get the same satisfaction even if you don't get into your dream school if you apply to schools all across the board based off of your academic resum</p>
<p>Also, staying away from the What Are My Chances posts will likely help you to retain your sanity. I'm sure you know, but it doesn't hurt to hear this for the 27th time. =)</p>
<p>yup yup </p>
<p>i must say though, if it wasn't for CC i would be pretty clueless about a lot of stuff regarding admissions ...</p>
<p>OF COURSE CC SCARES ME. I work my butt off to do well in school, then I come onto CC and find out other people are doing 9384729384792384732 APs and extracurricular activities and I feel utterly hopeless.</p>
<p>I mean, how is that even possible?</p>
<p>i know!!! i'm killing myself at it is with the APs i'm taking, and people are taking like 20 APs !! </p>
<p>they are like superhuman or something :P</p>
<p>It's the EC sections that REALLY scare me. I feel like I should be applying to a state college after reading some of those profiles. My extra-curriculars are nothing compared to some of the ones here....</p>
<p>Exactly. I love what I do but I only have a few ECs because I don't want to do things just for the sake of having them on my application. Then I come here and everyone has a million awards and clubs and whatever and it makes you feel like you have no chance in a million years...</p>
<p>I just read on another thread someone asking if anyone could get into Cornell with some horribly low GPA like 3.5.</p>
<p>Since when did 3.5 become horribly low? Is that just the nuts drawn to CC?</p>
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Since when did 3.5 become horribly low? Is that just the nuts drawn to CC?
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<p>Every poster here has had their perception of average grades changed from seeing so many valedictorian-like grades and ECs. Brainwashed please.</p>
<p>i know. i just got my transcript and i have an Academic GPA of 4.18. (my semester culmilative is 4.5) and i feel like crap cuz i know other people have like 5.0s. </p>
<p>i'm telling myself that ive done the best i could do and that i'm an amazing person ^^</p>
<p>all schools weight grades differently. A cumulative 4.18 at my schools puts you at about the top 10 in my class out of 500 kids.
So in terms of my school that isn't low at all!</p>
<p>The thing that most concerns me isn't even the skewed "CC perspective", but rather, is many students' belief that this stuff is generalizable. Colleges know that one 3.5 is different from the next, and when it's important, they take it into account. To assume that any of these are "magic numbers" is ridiculous.</p>
<p>I've read posts where kids say "Your GPA of 4.2 shows that you obviously haven't taken a very rigorous courseload, because my friend who's applying has a 4.9." This is absolutely meaningless, and terribly misleading (and, of course, skewed). I went to a high school where the highest GPA ever received in the history of the school was 4.41. Once. Ever! And we're talking about a competitive private school. There are schools out there that don't weight, so it's impossible to receive above a 4.0. There are schools where even a 4.0 is considered unattainable. There are also schools where a 5.0 (or somehow, even higher) is possible. </p>
<p>The basic, general info is great to get from CC--averages, the importance of challenging yourself, the fact that 4.0's can be rejected and 3.3's can be admitted--but specifics, particularly when they're not presented anecdotally, can be dangerous. If you're happy with your 4.18--you did well + you took some challenging courses relative to the colleges that interest you--that's more important than anything anyone here can tell you about the number (and I mean that from a factual perspective, not just an emotional one...you know the context of your own achievements in a way that we don't).</p>
<p>haha, my GPA is exactly a 4.41. But the scale is out of like 5.3 so it actually sucks really bad, haha. Big public ftw!</p>
<p>actually, how do we know if chances threads are accurate?? i'm guessing that a lot of them are helpful, but then some give weird advice.</p>
<p>1) exaggeration
2) lots of people here are probably "nerds" (find me a better word) who are naturally sneered down upon at their schools, so they feel the need to boost their ego's by either posting long lists of stats or smashing other people's hopes for a dream school on changes threads.
That's just how I see it. </p>
<p>CC seems like a slippery slope... minute by minute it gets more and more impossible according to the CC consensus to get into schools. So eventually only Nobel Prize laureates (like the OP said) will get the thumbs up from the CC authorities who surf these boards high on a nerd ego trip. </p>
<p>sorry if I hurt anyone's feelings... I'm just trying to have some fun here at the expense of @ssholes who make people like the OP feel bad.</p>
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actually, how do we know if chances threads are accurate?? i'm guessing that a lot of them are helpful, but then some give weird advice.
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<p>When you're reading chances threads, you don't know that people's stats are correct, and you can't know what else goes into their profile (good or bad). When you're the one posting the thread, you don't usually know if responses are coming from college students who've been through the process or from middle schoolers who are bored. Some responses are quite helpful, but the vast majority rely on the same average GPA, average SAT stats that you could find on your own. It's nice to have some "extra eyes" who can comment on your EC's and sort of judge you within the context of their own experience. The threads can be beneficial for convincing kids to add safeties/matches, for easing anxiety, etc., but even at their very best, responses can never be anything more than educated guesses.</p>