GPA and SAT for Musical Theatre

Hello everyone,
My daughter has been doing Musical Theatre for 11 years and has been preparing for this day for years!
She would love to attend Northwestern but she is disappointed at her SATs - we don’t know how important the SATs are in order to get to the Theatre Program at Northwestern so she is considering to apply via regular decision and retake the SAT.

Her GPA is 4.4
Her current SAT is 1350
She has at least 15-20 hours of volunteering each year
and a long list of EC activities.

How important is her SAT score? Should she still try and apply for ED or should she just apply RD only if she gets a better SAT later on?

Please help!

Let me be the first to respond. Are you kidding? Her stats are off the chain for ANY musical theatre school. Seriously. I hope others respond to this. My musical theatre applicant, 3.6 daughter with her 1220 SAT got in academically to every school she applied including the rigorous. (Except one public in virginia - out of our county - they take almost noone unless they have like a 3.9 - she was waitlisted.) Your daughter has a 4.4, and the rest of the stats you described - if she isn’t accepted academically to northwestern I would be dumbfounded. PLUS - haven’t you heard (the most competitive part) - if she “passes” the ultra competitive MT audition - and they/Northwestern WANT her - she is in, with those academic stats - the MT program themselves pull that trigger - not the admissions dept. Because she DOES have the stats it takes. Isn’t it enough that she has to go to all those MT auditions, plus shows senior year…does she have to take the SAT again with a 1350??? (you do mean the two parts, right) 1350 is superior. With the 1350 my eldest daughter (another daughter, not MT) would have strolled right into UVA - not had to be pulled and prodded to get her off the waitlist. But she didn’t have a 1350 - she had a 1260. 1350 is a very high SAT - particularly for an MT STUDENT!!! Let’s hear what others say, maybe they know more about this apparently ultra over the top rigorous Northwestern (your girl has a 4.4 and a 1350 - what on earth more do they want???)

My kid is a freshman in the Theatre program at Northwestern - so a couple of things. First, auditions for MT happen at the end of fall quarter of freshman and/or sophomore year - so there is no audition for admission to the Theatre program. Second, test scores will matter. My son’s test scores were higher than your daughter’s (which are phenomenally good) but his GPA was a bit lower (although over 4.0).

It might be helpful to see what the stats are for kids in your school district to see how she compares. Does your school have Naviance or a program like it?

Hi, thanks so much for your reply. So the issue - specifically for Northwestern - is that they do not have prescreens or auditions to get admitted to the school. That happens later on… Thanks for reaching out!

Thank you! I have met a few others with a similar response, higher test scores but lower GPA… This helps. Thanks

Does anyone know if the theatre major or even the school of communications has signifcantly different SAT scores / ACT scores than the university overall? Northwestern published class of 2021 statistics, but I haven’t been able to find anything that shows anything more detailed. Thank you!
http://admissions.northwestern.edu/documents/Class%20of%202021%20Facts%20and%20Figures.pdf

@ctaylors44 the stats are the same for all students

@theatremom10 thank you!