Hello, I am a high school senior applying to Duke for CS. I will include some stats and extracurricular below.
SAT: 740 English, 790 Math
GPA: My school has a weird weighting system, but I have had straight As in the most difficult courses my school offers (besides some history courses as an underclassman and junior which I unfortunately opted not to take) and am top 2% class rank
Senior schedule is packed with 2 APs (school offers few), 4 Dual Enrollment college courses, and 1 rigorous elective
I have done really well on NYS regents exams (98+ on nearly all of them)
Extracurriculars: 3 sport athlete, XC, track and indoor track, all of which I hope to compete in at Bowdoin (I am probably fast enough to run on the team)
Electronic Music Composition: I have an electronic music portfolio for the application as I have been making electronic music for 4+ years
Electronic Music Leadership thing: Don’t want to go into too much detail here but I run a (quite large) site thing focusing on discussing and teaching making music music with computers
I have done peer tutoring and math team all four years of high school
Chances: Probably 10%-18%, unless you are a URM. If you are Asian, then I would say your chances are less than 10% b/c you’re being compared to other Asians who have higher scores and better ECs. Your class rank is good, and your SAT is pretty good. Your APs are a little weak. From what I’ve heard, Dual Enrollment isn’t a super positive. It’s more oriented to those attending state universities – not super elite colleges, but maybe I’m wrong.
CORRECTION - I copy and pasted part of this from another school so just to clarify, I’m not fast enough to run at Duke!
What do you mean by “better” ECs? You haven’t heard my portfolio or read my essay so it is kind of impossible for you to judge how “good” my ECs are. I dont mean to get defensive, and I understand my chances are quite low, but I’m generally not a fan of this type of pointless negativity. Also I’m not Asian and don’t have many APs offered to me in any of the topics I am interested in (besides the two).
I’m not determined to be negative. You are the one who posted a “chance me” query. You listed what you have and then you don’t like the response. You should’ve have posted something that said “tell me I’ll get in”. I was giving honest feedback based on the info provided.
@sambsizzle as far as the AP classes go, don’t worry about how many you have taken. It’s more so that you have challenged yourself and that your GC puts that you have taken a “most rigorous” courseload. My daughter, a current Freshman at Duke, was admitted last year with only a total of 4 AP classes. The school does not offer anywhere close to the full listing of AP’s and she also had conflicts with several that she wanted to take due to her PLTW Stem classes (both classes only had one class, which happened to be during the same block - this happened twice). They just want to see that you have challenged yourself with what you have available. Besides, even if you took 15 AP classes and got 5’s on all of them, there are only so many that you can use for credit, especially if you are in Trinity. Pratt has a little more leniency, but there are still restrictions.
Again, sorry if that seemed defensive and I do want full honestly. Honestly, I think it was just the phrasing of “better ECs”: a phrase a see way too often on this site. “More academic”, or “wider range” or something along those lines would have made more sense to me. I just can’t help but think that people will automatically say “weak ECs” or “other people have stronger ECs” just to humble people (which I have had enough of at this point). Ultimately, I do want honestly, just honestly that is specific to my situation and not just the same thing I see over and over on every other answer (which is not to say “weak ECs” usually does not apply, just to say that personally, my ECs have more to them than I could write in a CC). Sorry if I came off as rude or unclear.
honesty* (autocorrect gaahhhh)
You might be able to elicit more helpful comments by providing information about the “success” of the ECs. For example, you could provide info about analytics of your on-line sites, number of downloads, number of follows, hits, purchases, or whatever.
Sometimes, it is possible for readers to provide insightful answers to “chance me”’. That happens if the poster’s level of achievements (for ECs) are clearly evident to readers (such as when the readers can gage how high and unique they are because the odds of someone being able to list the EC is known to the reader-ie because there is quantifiable data about it or the enterprise itself is so prestigious or well known). That might happens if a poster lists Pulitzer Prize, Olympic Gold, team member: winning IMO, 3-min mile, etc. In this case your chances are highly dependent upon the quality of ECs that can’t be judged on the basis of its appearance of you EC list. Looks like you have a great academic record but one that mirrors that of most students applying to the most highly competitive schools.
I hate to argue, but I really feel that I need to address something. ECs are one of the few things on an applications that are not quantifiable. When you get into the range of numbers and analytics, you are dealing much more with accomplishments than ECs (Extracurricular based achievements sure, but achievements nonetheless). However, just because ECs for the most part are not quantifiable does not mean it is impossible to offer insightful advice based on them. In fact, your very telling me that my application will be highly based on ECs is insightful and helpful itself. In addition, ECs do more than offer a University a sense of an applicants achievement. They can also tell the University what type of person the applicant is and whether or not he will be a good fit for the University. For example, I recently saw a YouTube video from Duke that explained how a synthesizer can represent Duke based on its interdisciplinary nature. Now, I do not expect a random person on the internet to have pointed me to this video or anything of the sort, but surely there is a sliver of a chance that someone with inside (or even outside) knowledge of Duke’s atmosphere could give valuable insight regarding “fit” or commonalities among Duke students that may be reflected in the post.
Again, I seek not to argue, and I see that I may have been quite unhelpful myself with my initial post.
I’m beginning the whole concept of “chance me” is kind of flawed (except for the highly achieved as you mentioned) due to the crap-shoot nature of admissions. But…yeah. Just wanted to get it all out.
@sambsizzle at Duke, high stats and GPA are pretty much an expectation, kind of like a prerequisite. if they wanted a whole class of people with 36/1600, they could, but they don’t. your ECs should represent what you are interested in and passionate about. you say you are interested in CS, which is great, but i don’t really see that in your application.