<p>I have 4.0 gpa and 4.7 weighted gpa and my ACT only 31, You think I can get into top 20 schools ?</p>
<p>Yes, your chances are really not all that bad for a school like Emory and Michigan (which isn’t top 20 by everyone’s standards, but is a great school nonetheless). If your ECs are good, then you have a decent shot. Apply ED I or ED II for an even greater chance. I’m not gonna be like everyone else on this site and tell you to “just raise your ACT” with a wave of your magic wand because I understand that that is not always doable, and you may have reached your plateau.</p>
<p>31 is decent and you cannot do better than an unweighted 4.0. </p>
<p>31 would be maybe the 20th percentile for the top 9 – Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Stanford, Cal Tech, Chicago, MIT – but that 4.0 means more. </p>
<p>Getting into those top nine is a quirky thing… as many have said on this site, it almost seems random – the 3.9/2350 is rejected, while the 3.8/2150 gets in. It makes little sense sometimes.</p>
<p>IMO from Duke/Northwestern/Cornell/Brown/JH on down, you should be a very competitive applicant.</p>
<p>And definitely go for it if you want to go to one of those top nine.</p>
<p>Now… are you considering LACs?</p>
<p>Your 31/4.0 combo makes you competitive at (practically) all of them. ACT might be a hair low for Pomona/Williams/Swat/Amherst, but it’s at least enough to put you in the game, and … again, you are a 4.0 student. </p>
<p>If I were you, I’d go for a couple top-9 national universities (your favorites…) and maybe five or six schools ranked 10-25.</p>
<p>And I’d go for maybe one of the top four LACs (your favorite – that is key, always) and several other top-25 schools – like Middlebury, Bowdoin, Haverford (Quaker Consortium - bonus), CMC (5C consortium - bonus), Hamilton. </p>
<p>(of course, if you don’t want the LAC atmosphere… don’t apply to them. Your choice, obviously)</p>
<p>If you have an absolute #1 favorite school, the admission to which you would never turn down, you could consider an ED app. </p>
<p>Or, you could go, for instance, SCEA at HYPS or EA at MIT/Cal Tech/Chicago/Notre Dame/Georgetown (all EA schools). In the latter case, that would give you an early acceptance chance at four of the top 20 national universities and Georgetown, which is like #22 (and very, very good if you are interested in international relations, government, law, business, foreign languages, etc.).</p>
<p>Best of luck to you.</p>
<p>thanks prezbucky. How about Brown and U Penn, I like to major in Bio or Chem ? Any good school for pre-med ?</p>
<p>While competitive those schools are reaches for all applicants, and particularly for someone near the bottom of the score curve. There are ~20K high schools in the US and there are multiple 4.0 students at many of them. A 4.0 is not nearly as differentiating without a very high score to add to it.</p>