Most Score-Obsessed/Numbers Driven Selective Colleges

Vanderbilt, Wash U, Tufts, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, CMU, NYU, Rensselaer, and Rice would be my anecdotal picks off the top of my head as schools that seem to value standardized scores more than grades. Some of the schools with the highest SAT scores, like Caltech, Princeton and Chicago, don’t fit the description because they also seem to demand almost perfect grades in addition to high scores.

At the other end of the spectrum is UC Berkeley and UCLA, which care far more about grades than about test scores. Students from my kids’ high school who have with extremely high test scores but just slightly less than perfect grades regularly get rejected from Berkeley but get accepted to multiple other top 25 schools.