single most important factor

<p>mine is grades/courseload, but are they looking for originality and going above and beyond this...?</p>

<p>When I went to the information session a few months back, they said they looked at you in this order:</p>

<p>Grades > SAT/ACT > Essays > Extracurricular Activites</p>

<p>Honestly, from what I've seen around here, they look at grades to make sure you are on par and then at your SATs to compare you to everyone else (at least thats the feeling I get). It seems like for Stern, Steinhardt, Tisch, etc. they look at your ECs more but CAS (and Stern) SEEM to focus alot on SATs.... if Im wrong, please feel free to correct</p>

<p>stern = 95% sat scores and gpa</p>

<p>i mean if you have a billion national awards, they can help you compensate for subpar in sat or gpa...or if you have zero clubs and EC's, you wont get in.....but for all intensive purposes thats all that matter. essays and recommendations seem to be trivial also.</p>

<p>Agreed. Though, even if you have 1500+s and 3.5s etc, if you write essays like a moron or a robot they might hesitate. they do reject 1600s more frequently than you'd expect.</p>

<p>ive seen 1500+'s rejected, but solely because of subpar gpa.</p>

<p>my college essay was the worst essay i wrote in my life...a essay about my grandfather, full of grammatical errors, and devoid of a clear theme, and very over the word count. Likewise, my teacher was a moron and didnt understand the concept of ED (though i explicitly explained it to him), so a teacher recommendatioin didn't even make it in time. </p>

<p>my sat was 1520, my gpa was 3.9, they gave me $20k. my EC's were average at best, and no major awards.</p>