The question kinda speaks for itself haha but if it isn’t, what would be a good score for this school?
30 is the 25th percentile:
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=456
Not likely. You should try and get your score up.
I think 29 is fine, as long as you have a solid GPA. 29 is the average from my school.
The mid 50% of enrolled freshmen this year is 31-34 so Northeastern would be a reach with a 29.
http://www.northeastern.edu/admissions/application-information/academic-profile/
I know 4-5 kids that were accepted with equivalent SAT scores (~1950) and good (3.7+) GPAs last fall, it is definitely possible.
True it is possible but I disagree with SternBusiness that a “29 is fine”.
@TomSrofBoston Those stats you posted honestly seem pretty inflated to me. Not saying that Northeastern lies about their scores (although it been proven that a bunch of colleges have in the past) , but they seem very high imo.
@SternBusiness You and the OP can check for yourselves the actual decision results from last Spring on CC:
@SternBusiness 31-34 is very real. Speaking as someone on the high end of that The school specifically has worked to raise that profile over the years. A 29 puts your chances much lower, though as ormdad said, it is still a possibility. With a high GPA, it still will be a reach school though. With a low GPA, it will be a very significant reach. NEU does put good weight into test scores.
Anecdotes shouldn’t mean a lot. Even the averages can be misleading sometimes. When we’re talking about pure stats, nice plotted data is where it’s at
Niche does a good job with that. You sign up, put your gpa and standardized scores in, and they give you a percentile.
Here’s a link: https://colleges.niche.com/northeastern-university/admissions/
“pure stats”, that is a good one. Thanks for the chuckle @julianstanley
The only “pure stats” in this game are the charts from Naviance, and even those can be misleading, because the green square could represent a hooked student, or be from 8 years ago, when standards were lower. Niche is self-reported gpa, scores, and acceptances and probably 1/2 bs.
I think think colleges go to great lengths to get that 25% up to a 31 from a 30 or even 29. A graph of the deciles of every student on campus would be very revealing. I think you’d see more <=29s than expected.
If a student gets a 28 on their ACT (maybe they were sick that day) and a month later gets a 2250 on their SAT, Naviance will show both scores but the student would only report the 2250 SAT, or that is the score the college would consider if both are reported. So it may look like a 28 got admitted based on that score showing in Naviance.
OP…you need to understand how it all works. Colleges have an official or unofficial cutoff each year. If they accept even the lower 25% with a 29, you are fine. Once you cross the ‘test’ hurdle, they are more concerned with other things, GPA, ECs, diversity, etc. The reason that the bands are higher is mostly because the kids who meet the other requirements best also had even higher test scores.
The difference between the fantasy that so many on these sites spout and the reality of college admissions is pretty funny. The ‘test as king’ viewpoint is part of what drives the test averages up. Excellent students like yourself will spend money and time to take the test multiple times to boost their ‘score’ when the original score was just fine. That artificially boosts the bands and makes it look like you need to be in the 30s to have a legit shot. Those same students would have been admitted anyway. The test scores are only marginally a ‘cause’ to the ‘effect’ of getting admitted.
The real answer to you question is ‘yes’. The caveat being it really depends upon the rest of your resume. A 29 with a 3.0 UW GPA, not likely without a major Hook. A 29 with a 4.0 UW and challenging courses, good ECs and LORs and you are walking in without a problem. Northeastern is not MIT or Cal Tech.