<p>I’m not on the adcom, but I’m familiar. Honestly, even with an excellent semester, I still see virtually no chance for admission to Tech. You need a cumulative UWGPA close to 3.6 to have a chance at Tech.</p>
<p>UGA is a different story. Right now you are a reach for that school and improving your grades could make a difference.</p>
<p>Honestly - your best bet is to make sure you apply to safeties and matches. I would consider GSU a match. The transfer system is made for a guy like you - someone that has the ability but just didn’t execute (for whatever reason) in high school. You can go to GSU, apply yourself and earn a high GPA, then transfer to Tech or UGA the following year. If you transfer to Tech, you’d only be moving a few blocks down the street.</p>
<p>I think you are interpreting your numbers wrong. Doesn’t the GPA percentage = the amount of kids who go there with that GPA? Meaning, your chances aren’t 3%. For all we know, 100 kids could have applied, 70 accepted for a 70% acceptance rate for 3.00-3.24 but 70/total number of kids in the school = .03.</p>
<p>Now this is a drastically overexaggerated example, but “y’all” get what I am saying.</p>
<p>Know, that’s how they’re being interpreted. Sure, theoretically 1 student could have applied with a low GPA, and that student could have been admitted, but realistically the applicant pool is widely distributed across the divisions. As a result, the OP would be in a very low percentile in admissions. Students that fall in that range usually have some hook - a recruited athlete, perfect SAT score, son of a state senator, etc.</p>
<p>is it just me or are you guys sensing a negative, pessimistic atmosphereme here…it’s making me a little uncomfortable. it quickly went from “oh, see u in tech” to “welcome to ga state!”</p>
<p>There isn’t a pessimistic attitude, there is a realistic attitude. You are a reach for Tech and as has been pointed out, you should not rely on getting into to Tech to the exclusion of applying to other universities where you are more of a fit for admission. While it is still possible you will get in, it is highly unlikely given your GPA and lack of a strong hook.</p>
<p>I also think things would have gone differently if the first post didn’t say something along the lines of “GT or UGA or no college”. If you posted a list of colleges with some matches, some reaches, and a safety, my response would have been “Tech is a reach” and that’s it.</p>
<p>But when you list just two schools that you have little chance to get into, then continue to disbelieve that you have little chance to get into those schools, I feel like it’s incumbent upon me to be insistent and recommend other options.</p>
<p>These GPAs are really something. I finished a very good high school with a 2.8 and was in the top 10% of my class (not the top 5% however). In most classes, at least half of the class made Cs and As and Fs were rare and evenly distributed and the Bs and Ds were evenly distributed.</p>
<p>Kinda like top private colleges now-a-days, where average GPAs have risen substantially (understatement). I don’t think it’s necessarily because we are that much smarter than y’all were back then either.</p>
<p>Did you take a very rigorous courseload? That would help. For example, I took lots (as in nearly most of those offered the years I was at my school during my time there) of APs and all honors. Also, yes my unweighted GPA was pretty solid. However, a significant thing about me, is the fact that my “unweighted” (just to be clear here) grades in the APs were, in most cases, quite a bit higher than the honors courses. And trust me, it’s not because those classes were easier. I tend to do much better when I’m seriously challenged. For some reason, I’m rarely the one to get the easy A. I tend to get the tough ones. Perhaps that along with my SAT score helped get me into Emory. As for Tech…my math score would have been questionable. I had awesome scores on Verbal and Writing (as in above 750), but I screwed up and got a 650 in math. I have no idea if I could have got into Tech though, because I didn’t apply. Like many of the science/tech offerings, but I don’t prefer the overall curriculum.</p>
<p>Any estimates or opinions I give are merely based upon my friends that were admitted. Trust me, it definitely helped that they were in-state. Some had (3.5, perhaps slightly lower, and may not have broken 1300 on Math/Verbal. I’m certain they did not on the first try. And these were not my African American friends either. So they did not have that “controversial” advantage in admissions.)</p>
<p>All my courses are AP and Honors, Bernie. Hopefully that works out in my favor.</p>
<p>Of their “core courses”, at the end of Jr year I will have:</p>
<p>3 Honors English
3 Honors Math (on AP Track for Calc Sr year)
2 Honors Science, 1 AP
3 Honors SS
3 Honors Spanish</p>
<p>After senior year, hopefully that’ll be an AP English (maybe…), AP Calc, AP Physics, AP Environmental Science or AP Euro History, and maybe another honors spanish course, not sure yet.</p>
<p>Yeah, your courses are somewhat similar to mines. I had a bit more done by Junior year (I was like a social studies freak. I had 4 honors and 2 APs by junior year, and then took Euro senior year lol. Everything else, we just about tie in.), but maintaining about a 3.5 in those types of courses, and achieving your projected SAT score will more than likely give you a solid chance. I hope you get it. :)</p>
<p>from GTJill on the admissions board back in September:
“Report all grades exactly as they appear on your transcript. Georgia Tech does not remove extra points that have been given to you by your school if the final weighted grades appear on your transcript.”</p>
<p>Georgia Tech (and UGA) admissions does not remove the honors points to the percent score that high schools add, so the original poster’s gpa is calculated with the 7 points bonus for honors/AP courses. GT then takes those percent scores and assigns 4,3,2,1,0 for ABCDF and add a half point for AP courses. That is why the original poster’s gpa is in the 3.5 territory, although not all those grades will count since the gpa is only calculated for academic core courses.</p>
<p>somebody said:
“it looks like I am on the short end of a 25% chance (3.5; 31 projected ACT; 2100 projected SAT)…say goodbye to Tech”</p>
<p>Having a GPA below the 25th percentile does not give you less than a 25% chance of admission, this is a common statistical misunderstanding. Let us imagine that the process for getting into Georgia Tech was very formulaic, and a high school gpa of 3.5 or greater was the only thing that they looked for. In this situation, the interquartile range would be high, lets say 3.7-4.0, due to all the accepted students at the higher end of the grade scale. Therefore, if you applied with a gpa of 3.55, you would be significantly below the 25th percentile, but you would actually have a 100% chance of getting in (remember, we are using our imaginations). Therefore, your percentile rank in a given criteria and your chance of admission can diverge greatly.</p>
<p>Overall, it is not very helpful to put much weight in comparing your gpa to the middle range of the admitted class. What Georgia Tech and UGA will really do, especially for in-state students, is look at your grades, class rigor, and test scores in the context of your high school, and how your gpa and test scores stack up to all the previous graduates from your school and how they performed in terms of freshman GPA once at GT. The original poster commented that his high school is a top-ranked school in Georgia, so chances are that Tech and UGA have a lot of this type of data that we do not have. So just apply, do a good job with the essay and documenting the extracurriculars, and don’t worry what we think your odds are because we do not know.</p>
<p>You’re reading that incorrectly. Otherwise, you would get the weight from the school for AP courses (+7/100) then an additional weight from Tech (+0.5/4) on the same grade. Also, this would make it impossible to compare between schools because of weighting differences.</p>
<p>What she likely means is that if a school weights a grade, reports that on the transcript, and does not identify the grade is weighted, then Tech cannot “unweight” the grade for the purposes of calculating an unweighted GPA. If a school did do this, the weighting should show up in class rank and Tech should be aware that the high school is being academically misleading.</p>
<p>Yes, my bad, they will not double weight those grades. They keep the honor/AP points (anywhere from 2-10/100) but likely will not add the 0.5/4.0 for those students. I’ll edit my post. </p>
<p>However, the difference in the weighting points (2-10), plus the fact that some school weight honors classes (not just AP) in a way that GT will not unweight and some do not (and some schools have a very loose definition of honors) is why they compare an applicant’s gpa scores to the performance of preceding GT students from that same school rather than put much stock in trying to compare GPAs across different school systems.</p>
<p>So, back to the original poster, he had 15 As and 15 Bs in high school, plus the 2 middle school Bs, some of those non-core classes (probably a couple of the As) don’t count, so he is likely in the 3.4 neighborhood for GT calculated GPA. 3.4 is the rough threshold mentioned by one of the staff at the admissions information session this fall.</p>
<p>seriously gp, u are the bearer of bad news! evertime someone gets my hopes up, u just find a way to prove them wrong and destroy my hopes again and again:) but i guess that’s bc you really know what you are talking about and i appreciate that and the honesty even though it’s hard to take sometimes. </p>
<p>and gadzooks, i only listed my core classes so what would my gpa be then cause i guess it would be a little higher now than 3.4, right? please?</p>
<p>Wow, guess this means I would have probably got into Tech lol. Wow, if GPA was calculated that way, I would have had roughly a 3.8 (we only add 5 to AP and 3 to honors).</p>
<p>Almost every high school transcript I’ve seen comes with a key that identifies how grades are computed and how classes are weighted, allowing for your to back out the grade difference. Otherwise it gets silly. Someone applies with a 5.2 GPA - ok is that good or bad? I can’t tell. If the school adds 2 points for AP and 1 for honors, then the maximum GPA depends on the number of AP classes. Is a 5.2 GPA from School A more impressive than a 4.2 GPA from School B, and is that more impressive than a 4.0 from School C? I can’t tell. Then you get into the “honors” fiasco. Some schools have multiple levels. First there are standard classes, above that are advanced, above that are gifted, above that are honors, above that are pre-IB, above that are AP and IB, and each is weighted differently. How do you make sense of that as a college?</p>
<p>In the vast majority of cases, it’s easy to back out the UWGPA from the transcript, so this is not a problem.</p>
<p>Bernie, my scores were pretty much exactly that and I got in. I’m sure w/ all your APs, you definitely would have. I was a bit hesitant to apply too; though I ultimately want to major in bio, I love my humanties too, but the more I look at Tech the more I realize it’s more than just a “science school.” Plus, you can, under certain conditions, apparently cross list at Emory, which I definitely plan on taking advantage of if I go. <em>rambles</em></p>
evertime someone gets my hopes up, u just find a way to prove them wrong and destroy my hopes again and again:) but i guess that’s bc you really know what you are talking about and i appreciate that and the honesty even though it’s hard to take sometimes. </p>