<p>My friend with a 13 PLAN/ACT and 2.3 weighted GPA wants to apply to UCLA</p>
<p>So what? As long as they’ve applied to less selective places, applying to one or two highly selective colleges with low stats isn’t any dumber than, say, buying a lottery ticket, and people do that all the time.</p>
<p>But a 13 PLAN? And a 2.3 GPA taking remedial science and math courses? And she is not applying to any less selective colleges at all; she looks down condescendingly the local community college and is intent on only UCLA and becoming a “historian.” And it’s not like her family is in the best financial position at all…to use money on those application fees.</p>
<p>Because this thread seems mostly to do with out clueless friends, that’s what I’ll talk about. Friend X wasn’t even ambitious. She’s going to this third tier school next year, and she didn’t even bother seeing how much it cost before she applied- in fact, I told her the sticker price a few days ago and she called me weird for looking at colleges at all as a junior…honestly, is it wrong to just feel smarter than her in general?</p>
<p>Every time I allow myself to believe I’m smarter than other people I end up doing something stupid.</p>
<p>Speaking of clueless friends, it seems my whole school believes that SATs have no value in college admissions and grades are the only things that count. Newsflash, the SATs count, a lot. So because of this, we have had several kids with SATs below 1850s applying to UNC, and only one person actually bothered preparing for them. End result? Only about three people (including yours truly, moi) got accepted. </p>
<p>Seriously, the value of the GPA as a tool for college acceptances has recently been degraded due to rampant and egregious grade inflation across the nation, to the point that schools are more and more resorting to standardized testing.</p>