<p>My son had a weak start to 9th grade for a host of reasons. However he has since been on a real upward trend each year and in his senior year is in a rigorous IB curriculum and challenging himself. His GPA is low though, 3.0ish, 9th grade really brought him down, but with his senior grades that will partialy be factored in it will be a bit better. His SAT's are 1990 and he just took the SAT 2's so don't know those scores yet. Neither of us graduated from college and he is from a mixed cultural background. GREAT essay, strong recs, good all around nice kid. He loved Vanderbilt and unexpectedly decided to apply. Also has nice ec's..he applied regular. Does it sound far fetched?</p>
<p>What has he done outside of class, e.g. volunteer, research, athletics, leadership, etc.? How many AP classes did he take? What is his class rank? What is his senior year course load and quarter grades?</p>
<p>IB PHYSICS, IB MATH, IB HIGH LEVEL ENGLISH, IB HIGH LEVEL HISTORY, IB PSYCHOLOGY, COMPUTER TECH CLASS. He does IB’S, will have done 6. Our school does not rank but I hope he is in the 20-30%percentile. His grades so far are in the order of above classes, B,B,A, A, C, B. The psychology however this second quarter is so far a strong B He is the vice president of an active diversity club, does tons of comm. service tutoring two to three times a week. Plays two sports well. Participates in several comm. service organizations, and a chess and a computer club. He also works part time, two days a week and on some weekends. That about sums it up.</p>
<p>first generation helps… it’s always worth an application, though. you never know</p>
<p>An upward trend is good, but you shouldnt really have a C in the up part of the upward trend, also, what are his reading and math sat scores?, cus vandy says that they don’t use the writing for admissions. He is going to have a lot to overcome with that transcript especially applying regular decision.</p>