<p>I'll give you the long answer without really answering your question.</p>
<p>In general, the number one thing that colleges care about is difficulty of curriculum, then gpa/rank and then standardized test scores. After that, they care about in different orders: EC's, recommendations and essays. Of course, there are exceptions such as colleges that don't require you to take standardized tests.</p>
<p>However, extremely selective colleges don't just take the best overall people. They try to build freshman classes to represent society as a whole. They want to get people from different categories. URW's, legacies, athletes, development cases, international students, and VIPS's are all wanted in the class. Someone may be admitted because the orchestra needs an oboe player. You don't compete with all of the applicants. If you did, the entire class would have nothing but people with 4.0's and 1500-1600 SAT scores. You compete with the other applicants in your informal category. The way to stand out is with your EC's and essays. In the essays, you want to develop a hook that differentiates you from everyone else. Thus they look at ten people who all have the same exact same SAT scores and the exact same gpa/rank, and they pick the applicant who does underwater yoga. URw's, legacies, and athletes have an advantage because less qualified people from their categories apply and so they have less competition.</p>
<p>Another thing is that there isn't room for everybody. For every student accepted, there are four or five who are almost identical, but have to be denied because there simply isn't room. Actually, they are waitlisted. Being put on the waitlist at an extremely selective school basically means that you are just as qualified as anyone who was accepted, but they can't take you because we ran out of space. Sometimes the number of people on the waitlist is the same as the number of people who were accepted. This gives the whole selective admissions thing the feeling of a lottery. It is a crap shoot. </p>
<p>The fact that you have the B's in sophomore year significantly lowers your chances to be accepted unless you are in one of the less competitive informal categories. If you are a legacy URM from North Dakota who won an Olympic gold medal, you are probably still okay. However, if you recover your grades in junior year, you have strong EC's, recommendations that say that you are among the best students the teachers have seen, and you write them an explanation of why your grades were low during sophomore year, then you may still have a place in the lottery at the extremely selective schools. Colleges look at grade trends so that an improvement in junior year will help a lot. Certainly you could lower your sights a little from MIT and UPenn and be in excellent shape at schools a bit lower than those. NYU is a bit lower.</p>
<p>To answer your question, I would say that nobody knows but you need to pull your grades up junior year. I would recommend that you don't think in terms of a dream school. You need to develop a list of colleges that you would be happy/thrilled to attend. You can not afford to think of any school as a do-or-die selection because the admission process is too much of a crap shoot. For that matter, MIT, UPenn (Wharton) and NYU don't have that much in common. MIT is primarily a science/engineering school. Wharton is a business school. NYU's campus is spread out all over downtown. I would recommend that you decide what characteristics that you want in a college such as small/mid/large, university/LAC, public/private, urban/rural/suburban, and etc. Each college has a personality. Do you care about frat/sororities on campus? Do you want a school with a lot of parties? Do you want a school where everyone is goal oriented and there is a lot of positive peer pressure because everyone is planning on going to grad school? Do you care about the political climate on campus? Do you want the school to have Division 1 sports teams? You have indicated that you already have dream schools, but you are a sophomore and I'm getting the idea that you are basing the dream on name recognition. At any rate, you have another year and the admissions process is too much of a lottery to count on getting in anywhere in particular. Spend some time looking around some more, and pull up your junior year grades.</p>