Sorry for the really long text - just bare with me for a while.
So, here it is:
One of my friends did his early high school in a normal indian curriculum and then shifted to IBDP for his year 11. In his year 9 and 10, his scores were really poor - it was below average. He was tired with the indian curriculum because all he was supposed to do was mug up. The marking strategy used in the school wasn’t useful at all.
People started recommending IBDP as he had an amazing potential, which would not be revealed in the curriculum which he did for year 9 and 10. He got accepted in an IBDP school (a year back). His first exams were quite average, ranging from 3-4 in every subject (we were surprised as it was nearly impossible for an individual to get those points after coming from such a curriculum; few of his classmates who came from the same curriculum got lower than that), but unfortunately, those weren’t the points needed by the top US universities. And oh, I forgot to say that he is craving for MIT’s EECS department.
In his second exam, his points got lesser than what he got in the first exam due to personal issues and lack of preparation (I understand this is irrelevant and just one of the excuses, but I had to add this). But since he had enough time for his Physics HL exam, he got a 7 - and this was also due to his gifted nature of acing physics regardless of his prep.
Let me list his scores out:
Math HL - 3
Chemistry HL - 2 (it was 3 in the first exam)
Physics HL - 7
Spanish ab initio - 5
ITGS SL - 5
English Lit - 2 (because he didn’t submit his internals - but his real exam score was around 3-4)
So yeah, this was it for the first two exams.
In his third exam for determining the predictive, this really blowed everyone’s head off:
Math HL - 7
Chemistry HL - 7
Physics HL - 7
English SL - 6
Spanish ab initio - 6
ITGS SL - 7
These were the only scores that were looking attractive for his college admissions and a proof of his academic excellence.
Although he has scored well in his third exam, his early high school and his first two IB exams were below average and a blend of average and slightly above it, respectively. Will that hurt his chances of getting into MIT? Will his scores prevent him from getting into MIT, or other top US universities.
Secondly, and most importantly, his extracurriculars are quite good. He was freelancing between many robotics classes and did many activities that included some dextrous stuff. He is basically a techie - he builds quadcopter, robots, he programmes, etc.
Besides, he also does research apart from IBDP as it’s one of his major talents. He mostly researches about technical things like scripting techniques, automation systems, robots, etc. By research, I mean, he does it to his level of knowledge. He always craves to find answers for his questions, and he puts that in the form a formal research. For example, currently, he is doing a research on the recent incident of Tesla’s fatal activity issue. He is researching on possible resolutions for Tesla, and he is going to make a comparison with the google self driven cars. Basically, he is building a design that resembles the mobile eye of the self driven cars and using that for experimenting purposes. He is going to test it only to a smaller scale, by using small robotic cars. So, these are the types of research he does quite often, but he did not officially participate in any research competition and does not have any achievements regarding it as he believes that those achievements would make him materialistic. I will delete this post as soon as I get sufficient answers because - 1) I don’t want him to see this - 2) I don’t want him to know that his research is revealed (although this might not sound like a great one to many of you guys).
He also got a grade 1 certificate in guitar; he is also joining piano classes, but would not get any certification for now as it’s a long process. He composes music in garageband with his guitar and his synthesiser, and adds some loops from the garagrband software (this might not sound great to many people, but I don’t mind adding).
Thirdly, he also has a start up idea that he will be working on soon - it’s basically like a social media platform that he doesn’t want to reveal - he only shared it with me. But, he would talk about this to the interviewers. I don’t know if this can be a good one for the universities, but adding this is not going to harm.
So finally, for a person who is mind blowing according to me and average at the same time, what are his chances of getting into MIT? Will he get rejected due to his previous scores? He has few more mock exams coming up, but then I think he can’t submit that as he’s applying for early action.
Sorry for the long text - just wanted to portray his resume in the form of words
PS: He is writing his SAT and SAT subject tests on October and November respectively, and I am pretty sure that he would ace them according to the university requirements. Add this as well.