senior, with a 3.4 gpa and 1600 SAT. I also took 6 ap classes and 4 ib classes, passing all the exams. should i bother applying to Stanford or im i wasting application money???
1600 on new or old sat? If new, that’s impressive. However, your gpa is pretty low for there. What are your ECs like?
yes the new Sat, i studied hard for it. I am a wrestler and i coach a kids soccer team on Saturday. I am also on the math club. instead of doing too much ecs, i think i really just focused on what i loved.
Congrats on the great score – it’ll give you many options. However, schools like Stanford need the full package – and the biggest eval factor is your transcript. A 3.4GPA takes you out of the running, in most circumstances, for the very selective schools.
Your perfect SAT shows that you can study but that you didn’t do much studying in high school.
^ and this is the very reason why top colleges will look at your record over 3.5 years of in class performance and weigh it much higher than any SAT/ACT sitting since this is a better predictor of your command of what the college will require of you.
but see i have a great upward trend and the bad grades i received are one regular classes and i got all As in Ap and ib classes. why should they care about my overall gpa if i showed i can do college level work?
Why should they care? Because they have many more qualified applicants than they can admit. Your GPA does not appear to be high enough to “check that box” and have them consider other factors. You can certainly apply and if your GPA for the past 2.5 years is 4.0 than that will help. If you have amazing recs and some sort of hook, you might have a shot, but it would definitely be a huge reach - only 4% of the last admitted class had a GPA under 3.7 while 75% had a 4.0 or higher.