<p>I'm a high school junior this year, and I've been looking at W&M. I saw on the admissions page that they want you to have taken physics,and prefer calculus to statistics. Math is not my strong point, and I was planning on taking stats next year. I'm also planning to major in French and German. So, what are my chances without physics or calculus? Also, if you don't think my chances are good it isn't heart breaking, W&M isn't my first choice.</p>
<p>Cty4ever,</p>
<p>Depends on if you are a VA resident, as well as your stats and EC’s in addition to course rigor. My son is applying RD to W&M this year, and my impression is the W&M process is more holistic and less numbers driven then others. At his NOVA high school, about 25 got accepted at W&M last year and their SATs/grades etc ranged the gamut from 1800 to 2300 and 4 (weighted) to 4.8. Yet, not everyone with the best scores and grades got in. So, I doubt they would knock you out just because you are not taking calc or physics. Maybe as a compromise, you could take calc A/B and a regular physics course instead of Physics B or C. In any event, there are likely other ways to demonstrate rigor such as taking lots of AP classes besides calc and physics and as many years of a foreign language as you can.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that we do not take intended major into account when reviewing your trascript so we like to see humanities students take advanced math/science and we like to math/sci students take advanced humanities courses. We would advise that you take physics and calculus if you think you can get a B in them. If not, as muckdogs suggested, try at least one. So take AP Calc A/B and instead of physics take an AP science maybe. </p>
<p>Muckdogs is right in that our process is holistic and no student will automatically be denied because they don’t take calc and physics but our pool is very competitive and you will be applying with thousands of other students who will have taken these challenging courses so to make yourself as competitive as possible we advise students to take the most challenging set of courses in which they feel they can be successful.</p>