<p>With perfect SAT I/II's(2400 and triple 800's) and straight A's in as many college-level courses as you can take, how important is all the athletic/EC stuff at the upper level (HYPSM, CalTech etc.) I am absolutely serious, and hopefully you take me seriously.</p>
<p>You can slide by without athletics. But ECs are important. People with 4.0s and 2400 SATs get rejected from top colleges due to a lack of ECs/awards and bad recommendations.</p>
<p>qikink:</p>
<p>...there may be a place for you at a top school if your references and essays match your grades and your test scores. But I have to agree with lebedev -- the top schools have no shortage of academically brilliant people. The top schools try to assemble an incoming class where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Do you have any interests/passions that take you beyond the classroom?</p>
<p>^You guys are way off mark--there might be a couple hundred people w/ 2400 SAT I, there might be another couple hundred with 2400 SAT II, and a couple thousand with 4.0 GPA--but there definitely are NOT too many with 2400/2400/4.0 (IMO, <100). If what Michelle Hernandez says about the Academic Index is true, you're basically guaranteed in at Dartmouth and other lower Ivies, and have a good shot at the higher Ivies, even without too many EC's.</p>
<p>From what I heard, top colleges do not differentiate much between 2350 and 2400 and would rather accept a 2350 with a special talent or ability than a 2400 who hibernates studying and does nothing else.</p>
<p>I have no national statistics, however I recently read that at the Thomas Jefferson School in Virginia (Public) there were several 4.0/4000 (Old SAT plus 3 SAT IIs). If one high school can produce several, I think nationally there would be significantly more than 100.</p>
<p>It's expected that most who apply to HYPSM are going to have great SAT scores, a great gpa and a great rank. It's the extracurricular activities that distinguish you from other applicants. </p>
<p>So, yeah, they're important.</p>
<p>HYPSM are probably the schools where the other stuff matters most. They have lots of kid with near perfect stats to choose from. Schools trying to raise their rankings want to attract great scores and care less about ECs.</p>
<p>Oh, and there are hundreds of thousands of 4.0s. That's not even top 10% at our HS.</p>