<p>Great news Creekland and SCSI! How exciting to have such good news now vs. April.</p>
<p>Note to self – for K2 be sure to submit lots of EA applications. Sounds like it will make the holidays much nicer! Creekland, I would <em>not</em> have been able to resist opening the envelope. Maybe I’ll try it once and see if it makes a difference in K1’s reaction.</p>
<p>In the meantime, best of luck as everyone waits for their December decisions.</p>
<p>I’m a parent of a D’15 student, and read this thread whenever there are new postings, and cannot wait for the BIG list in April of the schools where your children gained acceptance, as it gives parents and students of future classes confidence in finding that perfect school.</p>
<p>Congratulations to all with acceptances thus far!</p>
<p>Creekland–YES! I’ve been following your posts about your son and Eckard with fingers and toes crossed. I love it when our 3.0-3.3 kids succeed and reap their excellent rewards.</p>
<p>My son just accepted to Ole Miss yesterday. Very happy. It is now between Ole Miss and Roanoke. High Point is a distant third.</p>
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Oh yeah. A wonderful stress reliever (for both parent & student) to know that there’s a desirable academic home in the future. </p>
<p>After receiving two acceptances, things are much calmer here.</p>
<p>Congrats upperarlington and expat! It’s definitely fun to have acceptances early in the game.</p>
<p>Bunheadmom - my guy actually has a decent GPA, but with a lower SAT than one would expect with that GPA. Our school is one of those where the content is not all that challenging - certainly not “high SAT” caliber. It does make me wonder whether colleges look at the GPA or SAT more. We have plenty with high GPAs, but unless they have SAT scores to match, they don’t get accepted into “usual” cc colleges. Some try, they just never make it. The rare few who do make it have matching scores.</p>
<p>Fortunately, there are many colleges out there. Merit aid is available in many of them and acceptances/merit aid is common at the right schools for the “good” but not “top of the top” student. Sometimes on cc one could think anyone but top of the top are destined for failure. That’s definitely not true. Success comes from many paths.</p>
<p>Creekland—I don’t know if any of us outside (and desperately curious!) will ever know the answer to your question:</p>
<p>“It does make me wonder whether colleges look at the GPA or SAT more. We have plenty with high GPAs, but unless they have SAT scores to match, they don’t get accepted into “usual” cc colleges. Some try, they just never make it. The rare few who do make it have matching scores.”</p>
<p>What I think that statement does show is that college Ad Coms look at the HS profiles when rendering decisions. We have the opposite here. Not so much grade deflation, but an A is truly hard won the difference between ‘regular’ and ‘honors’ classes is huge.</p>
<p>I remember sitting at Villanova’s Info Session where the Ad Com quoted their middle 50th GPA range as 3.8-4.19 for admitted students. Well, 4.19 is almost the Val in our HS and the avg GPA of student from our HS admitted to Villanova has been 3.67. Just another example that Ad Coms have to look at the school profile in order to be able to make decisions. Otherwise, all of our admitted Villanova students would be well into the bottom quartile of Villanova’s admits. (Our admitted students’ SAT scores fall into their quoted range.)</p>
<p>Of course, even with all this data mining, absolutely no guarantees in college admissions!</p>
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And my young man is the reverse of that – a 2.9ish GPA, but ACT scores ranging from the 79th to the 99th percentile.</p>
<p>In a video on bigFuture, an admissions officer averred that GPA far and away trumps test scores, and the various school What’s Important profiles support that assertion. That said, our school’s college counsellor advised that colleges are decidedly sophisticated, and have a ‘master lookup’ of school rigor, and will raise or lower the GPA for their own internal evaluation as they deem appropriate.</p>
<p>Doubtless, at schools which conduct a holistic, ‘complete profile’ evaluation, the other elements (LoR’s, Essay, EC’s) will come into play, as will gender, ethnicity, international background and such, but probably only after clearing a ‘lowest-common-denominator’ hurdle.
I’ll leave aside the discussion of the public/private differences.
(e.g. - May gender or race legally be considered at public schools?).</p>
<p>At the end of the day, it’s one part math and one part black art.</p>
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<p>And we have several with that at our high school. They don’t always even make the top 10% - 20% with SAT scores. When we get one with both, they often do very well with acceptances. Without the SAT scores matching the school, they often don’t do well. My guy’s SAT scores were decent for the schools he wanted, so I felt good about his chances. He opted not to apply to the one that would have been an SAT reach for him. I think he made the right decision, but it was 100% his decision no matter which way he chose.</p>
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<p>That’s the truth.</p>
<p>Best of luck to everyone waiting for EA/ED decisions over the next few weeks. I’ll be chaperoning D and a number of her teammates on an international trip starting tomorrow. D will have several responses awaiting her upon her return home 12/19. She asked that H not open college mail while she’s gone, but I suspect she’ll change her mind and text H if we have wifi available. Cheers~</p>
<p>Enjoy your trip!</p>
<p>Hi All</p>
<p>Creekland–our GC told us that the Admissions always looks at the AP scores in the schools profile–whether those taking the AP got 4s and 5s…in order to test for “grade inflation”…<br>
And they look for high GPA kids to have strong test scores that correlate. Check your schools profile to see how your student fits. </p>
<p>Best of luck to all with the EA/ED results. It certainly takes the pressure off and I am glad we took the advice of other CCers to do some rollling and EAs to make the process more pleasant.</p>
<p>So far K2 is 4 for 4…yet the favorites have yet to arrive. If the next two (due Dec and Jan) don’t go well, then K2 will be waiting til April in order to decide between 1 acceptance and that one.</p>
<p>I am such a happy and proud mom today. On my table is an envelope from my D’s top choice private school. Two years ago we couldn’t have dreamed she would get into this school. Her grades tanked her Sophomore year and her first attempt at a mock SAT was oh so disappointing. But here she is two years later with v. good SAT scores and a much improved gpa with what appears to be a letter of acceptance to this school waiting for her to open it. Whew…it’s been along couple of years.��</p>
<p>Congrats lab317! That sounds wonderful…</p>
<p>fogfog - our school gets around that AP issue by not offering any… We do DE. When we did offer AP, few students mustered a 3 or higher. It’s totally different than the school I attended in my youth (different state too).</p>
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<p>What a wonderful, wonderful situation to be in, and such kudos to your D for putting in all the work to get to this point!</p>
<p>Congrats to everyone! Good to know that a bad year isn’t the end of the world, lab317!</p>
<p>@CT1417 If we wanted to get a sense of what colleges think of our particular high school, where would we go to see a profile? Is there a central web site colleges use? We aren’t the most rigorous school in our county, though I think we have among the highest AP scores. The advanced classes at least do NOT seem to have grade inflation.</p>
<p>Thanks all. What a relief that you still can trip in high school and the world does not have to end.</p>
<p>Anybody’s kid applying ED 1 to Rollins College?</p>
<p>Lab317 - What a great outcome! Congratulations!</p>
<p>How about this for a situation?
[Fordham</a> Fake-Out: College Accidentally Accepts 2,500 Students Who Didn’t Get In: Gothamist](<a href=“http://gothamist.com/2013/12/13/fordham_fake-out_college_accidental.php]Fordham”>Fordham Fake-Out: College Accidentally Accepts 2,500 Students Who Didn't Get In - Gothamist)</p>