<p>Admissions officers do not hold a crystal ball into the future. Each time they accept a student, they are in essence taking a risk. There are certain predictive factors that help them determine if the risk if worth taking, but as with all risks, you win and you lose.
There is no one factor that can determine whether an applicant will be a more successful student at Penn than another applicant. Given the information available, it seems that things like grades, course rigor, letters of recommendation, extracurricular involvement, and test scores do a decent job. However, with the inflation of credentials at many high schools, I think this becomes a lot harder. Another thing that people forget about is that a lot of students burnout once they get to college. They just stop caring because, many times because they didn’t do things for the right reasons. A student might have done biomedical research in high school only to have quit once they arrived at college.</p>
<p>^Thanks for the response, I can definitely feel where you’re coming from now. I guess going through this process for the last like three years has made me a little too jaded about the whole thing.</p>
<p>I’m a freshman in the CAS, thinking of majoring Bio -premed.
My high school background is unimpressive compared to my peers. Our class of 2012 was the first that sent anyone to Ivy’s. large, public not competitive.</p>
<p>No lie, but I am seriously finding it very difficult in my science/math courses (C’s) but I get A’s in Spanish and Writing Seminar even though in high school math/science were my strengths! The curves are really really difficult for math/science. (but then again I had chose harder courses when I was probably better off with BIOL101 or Math104)</p>
<p>Perhaps your high school background is much stronger. I don’t know.</p>