<p>"A straight-A student with very weak SAT II/SAT in many cases represents an extremely diligent student or a very poor test taker. This type of student tends to have good study habits and has learned how to do the necessary work in order to obtain an A. However, I would go so far as to say that many of these students are working up to 100 of their capacity and just do not compare to the brightest students in the country, who are their competition for a place at an Ivy League school. Diligent and hardworking yes; brilliant and/or insightful, no. On the other side of the coin, a C student with very high testing usually represents a very smart but lazy student who obviously has the ability to do well but does not work up to capacity. </p>
<p>The last important observation is that despite what Ivy League admissions officers will admit if you ask them, most value high scores and decent grades much more than decent scores and high grades. There is something undeniably impressive about a student who scores over 750 on the CR, math, and writing portion of the SAT and who scores in the high 700s on 3 SAT IIs. </p>
<p>It used to surprise me that even the director of admissions at Dartmouth would make excuses for students with extremely high scores. I’m not talking about C students, but students who did modestly well in high school (top 15% or B-category grades) and had astoundingly high test scores. Often during committee deliberations, I would hear him say, “With those scores, I bet Caroline was just bored with her classes and her teachers. I bet she would take off if challenged by other brilliant people in an Ivy League classroom.” You would never hear the same argument for someone with a number-one rank and all low 600 scores. The comments would run more like this: “Despite the impressive rank and GPA, we can only assume that his high school is very weak or that Tom is a real grind who would study all day and continue to do here what he did in high school.”</p>
<p>-Michelle Hernandez, former Assistant Director of Admissions at Dartmouth</p>
<p>^geeps20, getting good grades is VERY GOOD. But your grades can mean very little if you don’t have some sort of measurable intelligence or ability determined by test scores to back it up, that is all smugness is trying to say.</p>
<p>geeps- ask any psychologist and they will tell you the SAT is an intelligence test. Here is a quote from Dr. Robert Sternberg who was in admission at Yale, Dean at Tufts, Provost at OK St, and President of the American Psychological Association, in his book College Admissions for the 21st Century- “although tests such as the SAT and ACT claim not to be measures of intelligence, they correlate so highly with IQ tests that they are essentially interchangeable with them”. Also, “intelligence is what traditional IQ tests and SATs measure.”</p>
<p>I’m honestly not trying to turn this into a “Chance Me” thread, but since so many people have talked about holistic applications, I’m looking to get some feedback on whether my EC’s and whatnot help make up for my crappy grades.</p>
<p>In looking at Naviance, I’ve noticed that the average accepted student GPA from our school is lower - like .5 lower, a lot of the time - than the average accepted GPA that is published on the school web site for all students admitted. </p>
<p>Just one example, for “Good Midwestern LAC” average accepted GPA nationwide is 3.8, from our HS it is 3.3.</p>
<p>They know our school is more rigorous/harder to get good grades, maybe, or they know lots of our kids take AP classes (and our HS does not weight GPA).</p>
<p>I believe that the SAT is comparable to an IQ test, the ACT to a much lesser extent. I think that the sat is 25% intelligence and 75% skill.
Why? </p>
<p>I think any GOOD student can pull off an 1800 with a decent amount of prep, but smart students can squeeze out at least some of the last 600 points. While I take official practice tests and answer the CR, Writing, and Math questions I do think in a way that I sometimes ponder in the midst of the ticking clock (The clock doesn’t matter that much to me because I usually finish early anyways). I find I think in a higher level during the test. During it I put together so many puzzles, I see the smallest words in the CR passages that lead me to answers, I see myself using high amounts of pure logic rather than skill on some of the higher level questions, things that I can’t imagine half of the people ranked above me in my school could do, (I know all of them since we have the same classes together). I can solve the last three hard questions on a math section in literally one minute sometimes, by using the simplest math possible, and I can’t help but think those people ranked above me would spend 4-5 minutes using complex algebra and such and wouldn’t even get the right answer…some of the test definitely has to do with logic/higher level thinking/intelligence…but most of it is skill nonetheless, so even a “good” student with good grades should be pulling out an above average score.</p>
<p>^oh, sorry, it only appears if a certain amount of students applied to the said college (there is a chart button on the college when you look it up). For mines, only a few people applied to Yale, so it didn’t show anyone’s GPA, but like 40 people applied to a certain state school near me and they all showed.</p>
<p>Question: for Ivies and other top schools, all other factors equal, person A has 97% average 2300 SAT, person B has 94% average 2360 SAT, both from the same school. Would admissions come down to gpa/sat? if so, which person would be preferred?</p>
<p>^Definitely the 97/2300 because there’s not much of a difference between a 2300 and 2360 anyway, while a 3 point difference in GPA is much more significant. IMO you could’ve used a better example, say, someone with a 4.0 and 1800 and another person with a 3.4 and 2300.</p>
<p>Ok lemme introduce a new situation if any one can answer this?</p>
<p>Say you start off low in Sophomore(say a 3.3 UW) and end high in Junior (with a 4.0). Along with that SAT scores are fairly high at like a 2280+, but the GPA remains at a 3.65?</p>
<p>Is the dramatic trend more important than the actual average score itself? or is the SAT score the real “highlight”?</p>
<p>Also Naviance is weird and disheartening to me as well. For my school the average SAT scores and GPA are well over the college’s admitted freshman stats.</p>