<p>Our school is in California, Sillicon Valley.</p>
<p>Apparently only 8 people from our school got above a 2000 on the SAT...some official visitors came over and heard our counselor say this...I was right next to them, and I heard them whispering that our school is "horrendous."</p>
<p>How is that any fair? Does it really mean we're pathetic?</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter if your school is pathetic as long as you’re not.</p>
<p>^mm good point i guess…but still…out of curiosity, is our school pathetic? Isn’t it normal?</p>
<p>We had about 5-10 in a 500 person school by UCLA</p>
<p>We have 30/600 usually.</p>
<p>lol your school must suck</p>
<p>and it is fair. your grade did not get as good grades as other applicants. why should ucla accept more people in your grade if they dont have the grades?</p>
<p>Well, my school:</p>
<p>About 6 of us applied to UCLA, almost all of us ELC, for which the admittance rate is a whopping 60%, and I was the only one accepted.
My class has about 325 people, and out of all of them, my good friend and I are the only ones (that I at least know of) who have over a 2000 on the SAT. Three of us have over a 30 on the ACT. My school has 1500 kids, and no one has made the national merit scholarship in 6 years, and our last HYPSC acceptance was one Stanford acceptance 6 years ago, and one five years before that. We also had a Dartmouth 12 years ago. But that’s IT.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, we recently got a California Distinguished school award within the last 4 years. But I can attribute that to, well, when you’re at rock bottom, there’s no direction but up.</p>
<p>My school has a severe divide between people getting good grades and bad grades. Either you’re an A student, or getting straight D’s. There’s a severe lack of middle-ranged kids.</p>
<p>That’s fairly normal.</p>
<p>At my school, around 5 people got into UCB, and around 10 got into UCLA.</p>
<p>This has been bothering me since last week, when UCLA decisions came out.</p>
<p>So my senior class has nearly 600 students in it. A good number of them are super high-achieving. The smart kids all like to brag about the fact that we are one of the smartest classes in school history and we have already broken records for most Ivy admits in 1 year before regular decision even comes out.</p>
<p>I’d say a good amount of kids- 50, 60, or so- applied to UCLA. AND THEY ALL GOT IN. Ok, not ALL of them. But a VERY GOOD AMOUNT of people who applied to UCLA this year from my school got in. Obviously the sub-4.0 kids were rejected and there were some 4.0+ kids who didn’t get in who deserved it, but for the most part, my Facebook minifeed was clogged with “GOT INTO UCLA!” statuses last Friday.</p>
<p>I used to think that getting into UCLA was special, a rare feat. Because although many students from my high school have been qualified in years past, most of them were met with disappointment from the admissions office. Now this year, the whole freaking world gets in. I don’t understand. I’d say approximately 30-40 from my high school alone. What a joke.</p>
<p>/End rant.</p>
<p>And to the OP, no, I don’t think 5/460 makes you guys horrible. I guess it depends on how many people applied. If you had 50 apply and only 5 got in, then sure. But as much as you may want to judge a high school purely by where their seniors get in to, there are other factors that must be taken into account.</p>
<p>I’m a sophomore and all of the Asian kids in my school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina are already in 3+ AP’s. It makes me feel dumb and quite sad, that if I took the initiative my GPA would be well over 4.0 because they were “gifted” and had an immediate edge. Also, they are introducing new honors classes that we could’ve taken as freshman and sophomores. If colleges see that we didn’t take these, will it affect us if they don’t know that they weren’t available or will our guidance counselor make note of it?</p>
<p>^^Dude, leila, I know!! I’m from SoCal too and usually LA never accepts that many from my school… this year almost everyone I know who applied got in!! Even a few C-avg kids!</p>
<p>sub 4.0 GPA is a definite nono for UCLA? That isn’t true by any means. I’d give examples but I don’t want to divulge other people’s business on CC.</p>
<p>however i’ve heard the turnout for LA was pretty nice this year. gives me some hope (:</p>
<p>ashwin, i’m betting the most likely reason those admissions said that your school is “horrendous” is because they’re used to the overachieving success in the bay area. leland, university prep, notre dame, harker, mv, lynbrook, gunn, paly, etc etc already compose an amazingly huge applicant pool of rather overachieving students, many of whom took years off their lives to get a 2200+ SAT.</p>
<p>it’s likely they did a relative comparison (compare your school to lynbrook, with roughly the same student body as you) to schools in your area and thought if school X had 60 national merit semifinalists, but yours had 8 passing the 2000 bar in the SATs, then they had the right to make such a snide comment about your school. no matter how much the school might be “horrendous” to their eyes, they should still have an open outlook towards every school.</p>
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<p>Definitely. Even though I’m not attending the most desirable of high schools (I wouldn’t send any children I would have), I was accepted by an Ivy. In fact, I think it may be easier for a hard-working intelligent student in an underachieving secondary school to get into a good college/university than it is for a hard-working intelligent student in a fairly competent (course-and-student wise) secondary school.</p>
<p>I mean, we don’t know how many people applied, so we don’t really know how pathetic that is. But the SAT thing doesn’t sound too awesome.</p>
<p>No one in my school has an over 2000 SAT. And I’m the only one with a 30+ ACT.</p>
<p>Welcome to the poor VA boonies. </p>
<p>High-achieving here is taking more than 1 AP class (out of our offered 6, three of which were added this year…online)…</p>
<p>To be an honor student, you only need a 3.0. </p>
<p>I honestly don’t know how we rank highest in our area for state standards scores… >> </p>
<p>Anyway, your school is not pathetic. Seriously, you should see mine.</p>
<p>Secondary school education quality is a damned serious problem in the country. I think it goes largely ignored.</p>
<p>@ yoursky… Yeah, I’m not saying that having less than a 4.0 means automatic rejection from UCLA, but from my experience, I’ve seen very few people get in without it. According to data from the admissions office, less than 2,000 admits last year out of 12,086 had below a 4.0.</p>
<p>^Do you mean a 4.0 weighted? Because a 4.0 unweighted in most schools, where GPA is on a 4.0 scale = perfect, straight A’s = valedictorian, or near that. I don’t know too much about GPA, but since the likes of Harvard and MIT even don’t fill up with all perfect GPA students, I don’t know why UCLA could or would demand such a standard.</p>
<p>@ Millancad… I’m talking 4.0 weighted on the UC GPA scale.</p>
<p>Compared to other Silicon Valley schools, yes. Compared to the national average, no.</p>
<p>FWIW, here are the stats for my school and UCLA this year. 48 applied, 13 accepted.</p>