I have a 4.0 gpa and I’m the VP for my school’s NHS as well as the president of the Young Democrats. I’m an intern for a Congress member. The problem is that I have a crazy low SAT, it’s 1270 and that’s after the second time taking it. I’ve been studying for the test for seven months and it’s incredibly frustrating to be doing so poorly. I very badly want to go to Uchicago and my hopes are that my poor test scores won’t completely ruin my chances. Thoughts?
Unless you have some crazy hook, your chances are near-zero to zero, because of your test scores.
Yeah I agree with jgrasp. Your ECs you mentioned don’t really make up for that score. Unfortunately, the reality of modern elite college admissions is that with so many applications to process, admissions officers have very little time to review each application. See the following article if you don’t believe me.
With such little time (literally like 4 minutes), admissions officers don’t have time to do more than glance at your ECs and essays, so this makes it much harder to make up for a low SAT or ACT score, or a low GPA.
My best advice for you is that generally speaking you have a chance at admission if you are at least around the 25th percentile for SAT or ACT scores. For UChicago this would be a 1460 or a 32. If you are applying RD, you can try one more time with the January SAT, or you could perhaps try the February ACT. For me, the ACT was a lot easier than the SAT. If this doesn’t work for you, remember that not going to elite college isn’t the end of the world. It’s tougher than ever now to get into these top schools, so don’t be too frustrated. So many qualified applicants get rejected from all the elite schools every year.
Anyways, I wish you the best of luck! Hope everything works out.
I don’t know why you have a perfect GPA and your SAT score is so low… There is only two reason, one, you’re extremely unqualified for college-level critical thinking and reasoning, but you’re good at some subjects, like science. So you earned yourself a good GPA. In this case, try ACT maybe. And do well in SAT2 subject tests.
The other reason might be, your school have strong GPA inflation, and you’re not good at academics. Otherwise I don’t see a normal good student will have a 1270 in SAT, which is 200 points lower than average. Then your GPA is worthless.
It’s very hard to push limits of SAT, like push a 1400 to 1500, or 1500 to 1550, it’s more about details and mistakes. But it’s easy to get 1270 to 1400. And once you hit the average, like 1450-1500, the admission officers don’t really care about how much above you’re. But in your case, you certainly don’t know half content of this test, like you can’t understand the article or you simply don’t know some math equations.
The SAT test is never about how smart you are or whether you’re an accomplished student, it’s about your learning ability. They want to ensure you can survive the college, so if you hit the average, you can survive, then they will check the other things. But if you cannot even survive and get a degree, there is no point about what other contribution you can make to this community.
For the most cases, guys with SAT around 1200-1400 are extremely rich or hooked.