<p>Vicarious: Our Naviance shows the same thing for both GPA and test scores.</p>
<p>At both my kids’ schools, with the exception of recruited athletes, the only kids who get into Y and its peers are at the highest ranges on the Naviance scattergrams for both grades and scores. The local context is so important in evaluating your own chances.</p>
<p>Hmm. I may be wrong, but I feel like students who get high test scores often excel in other areas as well (I haven’t met a single person who’s done exceedingly well on the SAT but who wasn’t capable to write good essays or who didn’t have good ECs). It might just be a correlation…</p>
<p>^^I did not mean to imply that these kids got into Yale solely on the strength of their transcripts and test scores. Your academic record just gets you past the threshold at colleges like Yale. After that, ECs, recommendations, and essays play a vital role. Based on the posts on this thread, though, it seems that the academic threshold varies among schools. At the high schools my kids have attended, kids below the very top range of grades and scores just don’t get into these schools unless they have a genuine hook.</p>
<p>wjb: It may well be the case that in my D’s current school the only students who got in were those with a significant hook. This is not a very encouraging thought!</p>