<p>My daughter has her heart set on Swarthmore. </p>
<p>SAT I: 740 each section (2220)
SAT II: took Bio and U.S., retaking bio and taking English. No results in.
GPA: 3.49/4
Ranking: 22 out of about 800
Not a lot of extra curriculars-all of her eggs were in the theater tech basket. She has been heavily involved in that since 6th grade. Has been assistant crew chief and most recently props master.
AP classes: Western civ (5), U.S. and Calculus (4). Currently taking AP Environmental Science, AP eco and AP English. She is taking independent study for Intel Social Science research. She has taken other independent study courses.
Summers: Last year she took two courses in Bioinformatics at City College in the Macaulay Honors program and got A and A-. The three summers before, she took courses with the John Hopkins CTY program in marine life (on a boat) and now I forget what else.</p>
<p>She had an interview yesterday and it went well. They were talking about his research in education, her theater work, etc.</p>
<p>Normally, a 3.49 GPA would be a killer. But I am surprised that it still has her in the top 3% of the class. Is this a super competitive grade deflation school?</p>
<p>Assuming there is a good explanation for the low GPA, I don’t think Swat is out of the question, especially ED.</p>
<p>In her school, it is impossible to get above a 3.5 without having AP classes and independent study classes. There are letter grades. An E is worth 3.5. The AP classes and independent studies are worth up to 4.5. Indeed, her average would also be higher if her middle school Regents scores hadn’t been averaged in so that, for an example, a 90 on the Earth Science regents brought her average down.</p>
<p>Hopefully the school profile adequately explains it, or she could be really penalized for this unusual system. It is far more common to see grades inflated way above 4.0 through weighting.</p>
<p>Normal ED admit rate at Swat is about 30-35%, I think her chances are twice that, if the SATIIs come in strong.</p>