What prestigious private schools place heavy emphasis on test scores? I know ND is like this. Any other schools who look for high test scores above all else? My ACT is relatively high, and my GPA isn’t bad, but it isn’t as good as my ACT.
what is it? what’s “good” to one is not the same for all. Look at it this way GPA shows that over 4 years you are either consistent, have a trend either up or down or took hard or easy class load. A single test shows you have ability. If you didn’t apply yourself in HS what makes a college think you’ll start now? So what I’m trying to say is it’s all important and with schools like this it isn’t all about the grades and the tests (although they have minimums…even if they say they don’t) they look at the fit, will this student enrich our campus, what will this student add to the student body…so there are so many factors that having a low GPA or low test score against others who have stellar ones plus the rest of the package it’s hard to compete.
My ACT is relatively high at 34. My GPA isn’t that high; it’s lowered to around 10-14% at my competitive school. I know this isn’t “low”, but most top schools have 90% of people within the top 10% of their class. My school doesn’t rank though…
If you look at the Common Data Set for Notre Dame, the rigor of your classes is considered “very important.” The rest - GPA, rank, test scores, etc. are in the “important” category. https://www3.nd.edu/~instres/CDS/2016-2017/CDS_2016-2017.pdf
I agree with the others. It all depends on your school and your classes. My kid at ND is one of 3 from their HS class to enroll at ND. All were from second quintile of their class. One other from same quintile got in but decided to go elsewhere – Caltech. All had very good grades, very good EC, very rigorous class schedule and very good test scores. No one in their graduating class had a 4.0 and it’s tight at the top. Not every HS is the same and the universities know this, so rank and perfect/near perfect GPA aren’t everything. But, yeah, most of my kid’s new friends were first or second in their HS class.