<p>I'm an international student and my "school" GPA is 3.7 considering all my IB classes, but because it's bicultural, according to my official government transcripts which do not score all classes, it's 3.9. Are these GPAs good enough to be considered for Cornell? I'm not putting this in the "What are my chances?" forum 'cause I haven't even done the SAT, I was just wondering about GPA.</p>
<p>I had just below a 3.8 and got in ED so I’d assume so if your school is competitive yeah. It’s going to work against you though that you’re international.</p>
<p>What’s your weighted GPA?
Unweighted is pretty much meaningless since you can take easy courses and get good grades.</p>
<p>Realize it is never your gpa that matters. It’s how that factors into your class ranking that matters (if you have one). Otherwise they just compare you to other applicants in your school/area in terms of GPA or not consider it much at all - in that case your SATs will matter, a LOT esp. if your school does not have a very very good reputation.</p>
<p>Think of it this way: a 3.4 would be amazing at a top tier hs if you are the valedictorian (shows that your school is that hard and you did well comparatively to your peers) but a 3.9 in another can be really bad if that’s like only the top 25%. GPAs inherently cannot be compared for applicants from different areas and school systems.</p>
<p>^^ agree with colene, they have a reference profile on each high school, and if they have a question about a high school (rigor, inflation, deflation) they can tap the regional admission rep to get the skinny. Also, to the OP- i personally know of two kids with a 3.4 accepted to Ivy’s for last year and this year. Both white males, one is a recruited athlete, neither one played the piano with Yo Yo Ma or figured out how to safely dispose of nuclear waste. So, keep your grades up for sure but its not impossible. all the best</p>
<p>All else equal, a 3.7 is good enough, but certainly not fantastic. But as said above, it also depends on your school To have a better sense of your chances, you have to ask yourself 2 key questions:
- How do I compare to my peers in my class? If you are at/near the top, that’s a good first step.
- Historically, what schools have the people in the top of the class attended?</p>
<p>I called Admissions at Cornell about this a month ago and the woman on the phone said they don’t look at GPA, they look at Grades. </p>
<p>Also, when I initially asked “which” gpa on the transcript carries the most weight (some schools send as many as 8 different GPA scores)… the response was that they utilize whatever is sent. They do not re-calculate GPAs and don’t look at them as everyone calculates GPA differently. </p>
<p>I</p>
<p>"Unweighted is pretty much meaningless since you can take easy courses and get good grades. "</p>
<p>And weighted is pretty much meaningless since every school uses a different scale, and some don’t do it at all.</p>
<p>^ as i said, they use rankings.</p>
<p>Colene,
My school does not rank, and has a pretty awful rep with Ivy league schools… We send about 1 kid to Cornell every year and that is it. In over 10 years we have had only 1 kid go to HYP. My grades are far from stellar as I was unfocused Freshmen and Sophomore year, but My Jr year grades are shaping up nicely with the exception of Spanish. Does that mean that Cornell will look at my SAT score heavily? That is a good thing as I have a 1510/2240 (M:760 CR: 750 W: 730).</p>
<p>It can really go either way. International students have a harder time also - you have to just wait and see.</p>
<p>GPA is a decent proxy for getting a sense of overall grades. That said, a 4.0 with no honors/AP classes will not get you into Cornell, unless you have some fantastic EC’s. Weighted GPAs are meaningless since schools do them differently. Cornell admissions has looked at hundreds of thousands of applications from all over the world. There are very few schools that they can’t interpret GPA for and have a true sense of how strong a candidate is. Rank is a better proxy than GPA, but not all schools rank. But I’m guessing Cornell can make a very good guess as to your approximate rank from almost any school.</p>
<p>^yes that is true - when they can’t, they just find some other way to compare you to other applicants with similar backgrounds.</p>
<p>I agree with the others in this thread. Your GPA can’t get you into a school, but it can hold you out. I think a 3.7 unweighted should be decent enough to keep you in the category of it not holding you out. National awards might possibly help your application if you’re able to attain one. ;)</p>
<p>I would put the inadmissible GPA cutoff around 3.3-3.4, with anything between a 3.3 and 3.7 as being “unlikely.”</p>