low grades, good SAT: what schools to apply to

Parents Forum
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<p>My son is applying for college this fall. He will be mostly looking at top 50-100 kind of colleges. (USNWR ranking). If you have good test scores but below par GPA, how do you decide which schools to apply to?</p>

<p>some data points:</p>

<p>(1) pretty competitive suburban high school in NJ</p>

<p>(2) His SAT is 2040 (top 3% according to college board score distribution chart). Will take another one in October</p>

<p>(3) US history SAT II: 780. will another one this fall.</p>

<p>(4) three AP in junior year. His school SEVERELY limits the number of kids who can take APs in core subject matters (English, History, etc) - only 6-7% allowed. So that's something in that school. Will take another 3 APs in senior year. Couldn't take more due to the schedule conflict. </p>

<p>AP exams: two 4's and one 5.</p>

<p>(5) terrific ECs. all military stuff. some national recognitions. He is applying for ROTC scholarship</p>

<p>(6) the problem: GPA. weighted GPA 3.85/4.5 scale. His undoing is math and science related stuff, and C's in these courses really hurt his grades. Worse yet, his junior grades slipped. the course rigor is good. No fluff courses unless they were required for graduation (like drama, etc). Even though he is not a math/science guy, he will be graduating with full 4 years of math and 4 years of science. </p>

<p>(8) his class ranking is outside top 20%. They school gives us an option of reporting or not reporting class rank on the transcript. Of course, we will choose not to have it reported.</p>

<p>(7) almost all the schools I looked at tell me that the average GPA of their admitted students is way higher than my son's.</p>

<hr>

<p>I did enough research to know that GPA is more important than test scores. In my son's case, what's a match school? If I see a school where his SAT is above the top 25% marker, will this be a match school, given that his GPA is lower than average? </p>

<p>GWU is his # 1 choice. His SAT puts him in sort of top 30% in that school. Again, GPA is a problem. In a school like this, if he applies ED, will he be in the "match" zone?</p>

<p>I really would appreciate input from parents whose kids had similar issues.</p>

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<p>What is his GPA and class standing?</p>

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<p>How low are his grades? What is the rigor of curriculum? How many AP classes did he take?</p>

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<p>A 2040 SAT is very good but the 590 Math portion may be a problem in many of the top 50-100 colleges.</p>

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<p>nysmile and aglages,</p>

<p>my post was registered prematurely before I was done writing (some sort of an error on my part). The complete post is in now.</p>

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<p>aglages,</p>

<p>Is a lower score in one SAT subject (590) a major problem even when the total SAT score (2040) is good? He will be majoring in political science, etc.</p>

<p>He will be taking another SAT this fall. I hope his Math score improves.</p>

<p>(you must have picked up my son’s SAT M=590 in some other threads in a different forum. My hat’s off to you: terrific memory.)</p>

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<p>How much did the grades slip during Junior year? It’s the year that college admissions concentrate on the most.</p>

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<p>by the way, I just read a “fine prints” on Penn State’s web site: they said, two third of their admission decision is predicated on GPA. when I read this, I immediately crossed Penn State off the list of potential schools.</p>

<p>Are you aware of other schools like this?</p>

<p>For ROTC scholarship application, he has to pick his top 7 priority schools. Current list:</p>

<ol>
<li>George Washington</li>
<li>American U</li>
<li>Fordham</li>
<li>Rutgers</li>
<li>Boston U</li>
<li>Drexel
7.??? Since we crossed off Penn State, we need to come up with another one.</li>
</ol>

<p>In general, I believe state schools are not a good match for him (Rutgers is our state flagship, so throw that in for good measure). The reason being: they seem more strictly by the numbers, rather than “the whole person” stuff going on private U. admission process where they look at personal essays, ECs, recommendations, course rigors, courses taken, APs, SAT II, etc, etc. </p>

<p>If GPA is more important than SAT, and admissions are most based on formula, which seems to be case in understaffed state flagship universities with tens of thousands of applicants, then these schools are not a good target collectively for my son. Also, isn’t it the case that lower GPA becomes even more a problem for OOS students? </p>

<p>Would you agree with the above assessment?</p>

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<p>nysmile,</p>

<p>I saw the transcript they are sending out. They don’t show the cumm GPA, or GPA by the year. They simply show all the courses he took and the grade for each course. They do have the weighted GPA on each student file, but it did not show in the transcript.</p>

<p>I did the calculation myself for the grades by the year.</p>

<p>His junior grade is about 0.1 - 0.15 lower than the total average - weighted grade. For the unweighted, the gap is wider, since it’s the “unweighted” courses (meaning no AP or honors) in math and science that was the problem. In the weighted GPA calculation, his good work on the “weighted” courses (APs, etc) counted more so they raised his weighted GPA,</p>

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<p>The low math score may well be a problem, because it’s well below the average at places like GW. At our school the average (weighted) GPA accepted regular admissions was 96, early was 92. So it looks like that was helpful. (However the lowest accepted GPA - an 88 was in regular admissions.) For context, my son’s weighted GPA was 97, unweighted GPA was 93 and unweighted GPA without music courses was 87. That GPA put him in the top 6% of the class. Your son’s class rank - even unreported - may hurt him. Our school had an 88% acceptance rate for Early Decision and 44% for regular. I wouldn’t say your son is safely in match territory, but he’s got a better shot early than regular.</p>

<p>My philosophy for high SAT, lowish GPA kids is to find some (at least two) safeties where the GPA isn’t going to be an issue and just consider the SAT a big plus at those schools. For my son American fit the bill. In fact they liked his SAT so much they gave him merit money. (We were also lucky that they probably used the school GPA which was inflated by two music courses every year.) My son’s second safety was going to be Syracuse which accepts lots of B students from our school, but he got into Chicago early action to our surprise so he dropped a few schools from his list after that.</p>

<p>I also highly suggest applying early action and/or rolling admissions other places if it’s compatible with GW rules. (Rolling probably is, EA probably isn’t.)</p>

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<p>He has good shot at Fordham, American, and Rutgers. Has he looked into Syracuse University?</p>

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<p>actually, Syracuse was one of the schools we looked at. Perhaps, now that we crossed Penn State off the list, we should put Syracuse instead in the top 7 school choice list for Army ROTC scholarship application.</p>

<p>By the way, is it a general consensus that a lower score in Math will still stick out like a sore thumb even if his total V+M or V+M+W scores put him well above the average, and perhaps even above 75% marker among the admitted students in a college?</p>

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<p><a href=“http://www1.american.edu/academic.depts/provost/oir/cds.pdf[/url]”>http://www1.american.edu/academic.depts/provost/oir/cds.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
^here’s the common data set for American.</p>

<p>Typically, colleges focus on the CR/M combo.</p>

<p>Another good school for him to look into is the University of Pittsburgh.</p>

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<p>Liz, the math score will be looked at in context- if your son has taken college prep or honors math (i.e. not the most challenging but one step down) and has consistently gotten B+/A-, then the math SAT score seems just about right. He is not majoring in math or engineering, and he has other things going for him.</p>

<p>OTOH, it seems to me that raising that math SAT to the point where it’s no longer problematic shouldn’t be too tough. Does your son know which parts of the test he consistently misses? it could be something very basic- like he had strep the week in fifth grade where they learned how to multiply fractions, so he doesn’t know the shortcuts. Or some computational errors that he makes by not knowing some down and dirty ways to to estimate. A lot of the math portion is made up of questions where it’s not necessary to actually do the entire problem- you can go 2/3’s of the way and quickly eliminate all the wrong answers without taking the extra 3 minutes to finish the problem.</p>

<p>So spending time with one of the gigantic back-breaking SAT Math review books seems to me like a good use of what little free time your son has.</p>

<p>Have you looked at the data from your HS about the schools on your list? And if your S decides not to do ROTC are any of these affordable options?</p>

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<p>fortunately, we can afford to pay private tuition even without ROTC scholarship, though that will force us to economize on a lot of things we used to take for granted.</p>

<p>His V+M is 1340 (750 in V, 590 in M). I am hoping that he can increase his M score this fall. By the way, his low score in SAT Math reflects his general problem with the math etc. He has not taken Honors or AP stuff in math related stuff. he is getting more like B, B+ and C+ in math. It’s always been a struggle for him.</p>

<p>His older brother is a math genius. He was saying the other day "what happened to the math gene in this family? it skipped me? (my H and I both had a lot of graduate work done in math related stuff).</p>

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<p>What is his rank? What is his unweighted GPA? It’s not clear to me that you would be better off not reporting his rank, if he is truly at a competitive public school, and he is within the top 30-40%. Some schools grade more harshly than others.</p>

<p>Because his Writing SAT score was good, look at schools that consider the SAT out of 2400 rather than out of 1600.</p>

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<p>Liz, I was your son in HS. I came from a math intensive family, was never good in math, struggled through HS chemistry and then threw in the towel.</p>

<p>I had to take a remedial math class for graduate school which covered arithmetic through first year calculus over one summer. (i.e. K-12 plus first year college calc for those who hadn’t taken it before.) It was the best math experience of my life. It made me wish for a “do-over” on virtually every career decision I had made up until that point. The instructor was an adjunct (they are being much maligned on another thread) who was the most gifted math teacher I had ever had; the problem with never being tracked into the top math classes at most HS and middle schools is that you never get the top math teacher!!! They’re the ones teaching AP’s and dealing with the mathematically gifted.</p>

<p>10 hours with a strong math teacher (either the top math teacher in your own school system or a neighboring school system) can raise your son’s math score by 100 points. I have learned watching my own kids take the SAT’s that the math is actually not that hard even though my math score was 150 points below my verbal. I had just never really understood the concepts and so every word problem was a disaster, everytime I saw X or Y I tried to slog my way through it without really understanding.</p>

<p>If your S isn’t interested in raising his math score leave it alone- he will have some fantastic options. But I am sad that I spent so much of my academic career being “Bad in Math”. I would never have been strong enough to be an engineer or research scientist, but for sure I could have handled medical school, many careers which required statistics (which I breezed through after having had the genius math remedial teacher), higher level economics, etc.</p>

<p>And I did have strep back in fifth grade, and I did struggle in HS because of very basic deficiencies in my math prep. During that summer of K-12 remediation, there was never a day when someone in the class didn’t gasp and yell out, “Now I get it”. And these were future doctors, architects, nurses, pharmacists, social scientists… all of whom had marginally lower test scores than their respective grad programs typically admit, so we were all in the same boat. Otherwise qualified… but a smidgen below the bar.</p>

<p>Your son can do it.</p>

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<p>Very normal for a young male – many need a little extra time to marinate before working at their full potential. </p>

<p>Look for some small gems of colleges and check out the honors programs there. If the honors program says something like “must have 3.9+ GPA” take a moment and email the honors program and say that you have a male teen with lovely SAT scores but the GPA is a bit lower than their posted shopping list. You may find that they are quite welcoming – and a warm, smart spot might bring out the best in him. </p>

<p>Be forewarned that the CC crowd tends to be the most hyper of parents and applicants. It can be sobering and worrisome to read about the cutthroat competition for HYP-- and yet there are thousands of colleges that aren’t brutal but ARE competent and challenging. Start focusing on the terrific strengths of this young man – and don’t let peers or counselors (or your time on CC) make him feel inadequate. </p>

<p>I loved the book Seabiscuit. Seabiscuit fell into the hands of a wily and wise old trainer who had seen many talented young horses burned up by being raced too hard too young. The trainer gave Seabiscuit the gift of time – and combined some intensive training with some serious goofing off time to produce a champion. The trainer saw in Seabiscuit those qualities that were needed – and had faith that a little time could ripen the fruit splendidly.</p>

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<p>A lot of the large universities, private or public, look at transcripts first as a filter. The admissions dean at Boston U told us that with so many applications, they look only at the HS transcript, then reduce to a third of their applicants before looking at the actual applications.</p>

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<p>Olymom, what a breath of fresh air. Thanks from all of us with a S who is still marinating!</p>