<p>I'm an italian high school student in her junior year ( which is our 4th year ) and I want to apply to an american college .
My problem is I know you have GPA's n class rankings and colleges do look at them but we have none of that .
For example we have 15 compulsory subjects , which is quite crazy , n I'm doing the most difficult school you could ever attend ( we have ancient greek , latin , physics , chemistry , literature , foreign literature , maths , history and so on ) and my last year marks were beet wen 7 and 8 out of 10 ( with a 6 in P.E. ) , which is quite good cause it's almost impossible to get 9 or 10 ( we have very subjective scores ) but this year I'm getting higher marks .
So when applying to college are they gonna look at that ? I think it's quite stupid cause our school system is SO different and so hard that you can't really judge how good a student was . Moreover I'm doing SAT n SAT II so could they be more important than high school marks ? Like if I get 800 in maths n 800 in verbal , shouldn't it be enough ?
Besides they ask for a guidance consuleor to fill some form but we have nothing like that , we don't even have a real principal and most teachers know nothing about colleges .So how am I supposed to go through all the application process when I myself don't know how to do it ?
Ok sorry this is really messed up but I really need some good tips :) ** thanks :)</p>
<p>Universities evaluate a wide range of factors (especially those that do holistic review), so just because your test scores or whatever you can think of are lower than usual does not necessarily mean you can’t get accepted somewhere.</p>
<p>I’m not quite sure what you are asking…Are you asking for an overview of how an international student would apply to a U.S. college?</p>
<p>I wasn’t quite sure whether they would give more importance to SAT’s or my high school marks And how can my school fill the guidance consuleor ( sorry I don’t know how to spell it ) when we don’t have one ?</p>
<p>Penny, when your school has a unique grading system, the school needs to send the college information so that admissions may interpret your grades. We call that a School Profile. Also, taking the SAT subject tests, and not just the SAT I, and scoring well on the subject tests, would give the colleges a good idea of your academic levels.</p>
<p>The only thing I want to add here is that regardless of the international awareness that admissions committees claim, they will simply not be nearly as familiar with the Italian education system and the grading that it entails as you might assume. Try to do really well on your SAT, because that is an objective measure of your capability that they will be able to easily identify with (and thus make them more likely to accept you)</p>
<p>For international students, SAT and standardized tests, (AP, IB, A-levels) would be crucial.
Of course admissioners cant be familiar from all grading systems all around the world and cannot compare students from different schools. SAT does that for them. If you are from relatively small and unknown school that they never heard of, rather than performance in school, standarized test scores will be really important.</p>
<p>@nirvana where can I do a standardized test ? And yeah I was really really scared I had to get straight 10s which no one ever happened to get in Italy and especially in the kind of school I attend *** so thanks :)</p>
<p>If you don’t have guidance counselor at school, ask one of the school administrators to fill out the form. If you don’t have any school administrators, as one of the teachers fill out the form. You mentioned that your school have 15 subjects, it is not a big deal. Because if you count the courses offered by American high school, there are maybe more than 15 subjects offered. However, you don’t need to take all 15 subjects (we call them courses).</p>
<p>Well think about it like this, HS is 4 years of your life. SAT/ACT is 4 hours. GPA is more important than a randomly high SAT. However, a high SAT is still better then a low one ;)</p>
And how can my school fill the guidance consuleor ( sorry I don’t know how to spell it ) when we don’t have one ?</p>
That’s really helpful :)</p>