Hey there I have some questions on how the Penn state admission process works.
How does penn state weigh the gpa of their applicants? My school doesn’t weigh gpa nor offer a class rank but I take alot of H and AP courses (which makes my gpa a little low) so I’m wondering how Penn state takes that into account.
On the Penn state admission site it talks about a personal statement and doesn’t mention of an essay? I’m confused on what I am supposed to write in place of the essay (if it really isn’t needed)?
Google "Penn State applying on the web worksheet." It's a pdf of what the application looks like. The personal statement prompt is: "Please tell us something about yourself, your experiences, or activities that you believe would reflect positively on your ability to succeed at Penn State. This is your opportunity to tell us something about yourself that is not already reflected in your application or academic records. We suggest a limit of 500 words." You can reuse an essay from another app if you want. It's optional but it doesn't hurt to do it.
Slightly easier admissions standards in exchange for spending the summer before your freshman year on campus taking a couple classes.
You should always write the essay. Unless you’re a recruited athlete always treat “recommended” as " required".
Applying for the summer session means they’ll be a little bit more lenient (it’s a good idea to do so if your GPA is 3.4-3.5) but it costs 8k. That being said, it’s a great opportunity, you get to make friends and discover the campus with only 10,000 students around (v.40,000), and knock out two requirements.
Number of honors or AP’s is factored in: add them all up together (9-12 + whatever honors hs classes you took in ms) what number do you get?
We just did “spend the day at Penn State” this past Thursday. They told us that admittance is a numbers game more than once. Getting in is 75% gpa and 25% SAT’s. I had a one on one with one of the admittance counselors and she told us that with the number of applications it was impossible for them to look at anything more. They don’t care what classes you take or how well “rounded” you are. All they cared about was they numbers
@mcardamone : curriculum does matter. They recalculate GPA based on how many AP/honors you took, and whether you took some specific classes they consider “rigor markers” ( 3-4 + years of a foreign language, precalculus or calculus, all three from Bio, Chem, Physics). The essay and curriculum rigor are also used in evaluating for scholarships (what few there are). They check curriculum for red flags : for instance, unless you have a serious reason, you’re not getting into Engineering if you didn’t take at least precalculus. That recalculated GPA is 75% of the decision but it does include curriculum rigor.
All of that is checked before it gets to a decision maker. The process is rather long (the admissions blog had a very good blog post with pictures on this a couple years ago.)
@MYOS1634 I went to the PSU spend a summer day today and they told me they look at the classes applicants take, the school (how challenging it is and what classes it offers) and applicants gpa in context of the school. So now I’m very confident that my lower gpa won’t result in an automatic no from the school.
With a score of 17 for rigor, I’m confident it’s not an automatic no, but if your (re)weighted gpa is below 3.4 put summer session and be ready to wait till Jan 30.
Does Penn State review apps and if they are not high stats do they put them back in a pile to be reviewed later? Or do they put them in a batch with the major chosen and randomly select? Some on this forum have said it is random while others have said high stats hear back first and borderline will not hear back until end of Jan.
@krabbiek Short answer…Yes. The process is random. If you hear earlier, you likely have very high stats so obviously some of those apps are sorted that way - however, MOST high stat applicants do not hear until January. So…what does that mean? It means the process is random and not very transparent. All we know for sure is that your application is coded and sorted when it arrives. It is coded by several different categories and several different pipelines. So, two people with identical stats and applying for the same major still are not going to hear at the same time necessarily. It depends on the admission counselor your app is placed with as well.