<p>5boys:</p>
<p>Have you spoken to the college counselor at your son’s school about what are your son’s realistic college aspirations? He should be able to give you a good idea.</p>
<p>It is hard to know if he is in the top 70% of his class. All of the kids are extremely bright and are all so close GPA wise. They all take hard classes… although no one takes more than 5-6 AP’s. There are a few honor classes that are weighted and also a few Advanced Honors classes that are above AP level and are weighted. My S had a rough start in math due to computational problems but is doing fine now, but most kids are very accelerated in math. I did look on our schools Naviance and it looked like there were a lot of B, B+ kids getting into top 20 LAC’s so I was relatively reassured there. Most kids want Ivy’s and little I’vy’s. My point was that it’s hard to go by the advice on this thread when your kid goes to a top prep school. Those high GPA’s are hard to come by.</p>
<p>if you are paying all that money why not trust the college counselor and previous results on naviance at your school? sounds like you are stressing for nothing…</p>
<p>5boys- agree with the others you can’t make strong comparisons to the others here on cc from different schools. Look at your naviance data, that is your best source. Only caveat there is if your school is very small and/or if your kid is looking outside of the popular choices from your HS you might not have sufficient data points.</p>
<p>My kids go to an independent school also and it has been much more helpful for us to look at colleges from the context of our school than from posts on cc.</p>
<p>5boys: In contrast to your school’s GPA calculation, one of my kids has a grade on his HS transcript from a class he took when he was ten years old. </p>
<p>The GCs at my kids’s schools are really meticulous about gathering Naviance data, so we found it more accurate than CC because the Naviance data reflected kids who had taken a similar program <em>at that school.</em> We knew that some schools wouldn’t take S1 because of the GPA (which was above this thread’s demographic, but WELL below a 4.0 UW) despite the test scores and serious hardware. We also knew that other top schools accepted kids from this program at 3x the rate of their regular acceptance rate. </p>
<p>Armed with this info, my kids were able to put together good lists of schools they liked with reasonable odds of acceptance.</p>
<p>Talk to your GC. It’s what you are paying for!</p>
<p>My D went to our neighborhood public school, a school with strict grading standards. Had I limited myself to the information on cc, I would have thought that applying to any T20 school would have been a waste of time and money in spite of her high test scores and impressive EC’s. Our school’s Naviance showed otherwise, and her rate of acceptances mirrored Naviance.</p>
<p>Time for an update. </p>
<p>First the bad news: S1 had his second weakest semester for the mid-year report. We need to further lower our expectation for April. His overall GPA is still above 3.5, but it doesn’t look pretty. I contributed a small part to this situation :(. His gym teacher surprised him with a very low grade because I forgot to call the absence line early in the day when S1 had to skip his morning gym class that day. After explaining the situation with the teacher and his GC, the gym teacher revised it to a B which still reflects a penalty for my late call. The only comfort is that the gym class only carries a fraction of the credit of a normal class. Mia culpa. But, I still think the gym teacher should have alerted S1 with his intended grading and not let it be a surprise.</p>
<p>Now the good news: We learned last night from Tulane’s website that S1 has been accepted. We are now waiting for the mail to see if he gets any money with it.</p>
<p>^^^^
Are you sure the schools you applied to even count gym in their GPA calculation. I don’t think they all do.</p>
<p>Man, that’s a strict attendance policy. I think my kid would be expelled if we had to adhere to something like that.</p>
<p>S1 received an invitation from Notre Dame to apply for the “Glynn Family Honors Program”. This program accepts top 5% of the projected incoming class. We are very happy. Both Tulane and Drexel also accepted S1 to their Honors Program/College along with merit scholarships. The next news will be on Pi day.</p>
<p>^^^^
Congratulations. What’s “Pi” day?</p>
<p>March 14th (3.14).</p>
<p>bovertine, thanks.</p>
<p>As fc said, Pi day is 3/14. MIT has been releasing their regular decisions on Pi day for the last few years. Just two weeks away!</p>
<p>Yeah, I googled that up. This stuff has a vocabulary of its own.
Well, good luck for a happy Pi-Day.</p>
<p>3.14 march 14!</p>
<p>We moved to Hawaii last year from Europe, because of my husband’s job, and because we found a school with an IB program and a performing arts center. Our daughter wants to study classical voice, but we are realistic to know the odds are against her. We are totally new to all of this. The UK system is very different. Her grades in the first semester (sophomore) were OK’ish, but she was new and had a major part in a school musical, so was really overextended. Her PSAT’d were really good (I think; mid to high 90’s) so we get all sorts of colleges contacting her. Her GPA first semester was only 3.2. WE know NOTHING of scholarships, weighting, legacy. We just want to find a school which has a good English / Music program where we can try for some scholarships. The cost does matter but with a bit of belt tightening, we can handle a private university. She is a city girl, London, Munich are her stomping grounds. Does ayone have any experience of a similar situation.</p>
<p>CER</p>
<p>^What were her PSAT section scores? (90s refers to the percentile, which is less obscure and much less important than the actual scores.)</p>
<p>You should post on the Music Majors forum for advice on voice.</p>
<p>I have a child whose GPA is a little higher than those being discussed here, but he’s looking at all tier 1 schools and he needs lots of merit money in order to be able to afford them. He did not do well in his freshman year - about an 89 avg. Since then, however, he has progressed higher and higher and so far this year, he has a weighted 98 avg.</p>
<p>This being said, we are positioning him for a blockbuster senior year. He will being taking 2 APs and 2 SUPA courses (Syracuse University extension courses). He is working with a private tutor in the hopes of getting perfect scores on the math portion of the SAT and ACT exams. He does a lot of volunteer work and will graduate with a silver cord - how our high school symbolizes 100 hours of community service. He has participated in Science Olympiad, is on the volleyball and fencing teams and has done personal research on electrical energy. He also works as a camp counselor every summer, and this summer may take some outside college classes at a community college.</p>
<p>So far, he has a 730 on the math SAT II, and will be taking two AP exams this year. I think it is safe to say he is well-rounded and is challenging himself more and more each year. I think if your child is not particularly outstanding (my friend’s son just received a perfect score on his SATs), then we must make them as well-rounded as possible and provide very resource within our power to bolster them in their best subjects.</p>
<p>That being said, I’m not sure what this thread characterizes as a “Top 20” school. Definitely schools like MIT and the Ivy’s will be out of our reach. However, there are reach schools like RPI and SUNY Binghamton that will definitely look at a student who only keeps getting better.</p>
<p>Good luck to everyone!</p>
<p>Oh yes, I forgot - he also plays trombone in both marching band and a smaller more elite group at school.</p>
<p>My son did fairly well at the regional science fair last week. The judges placed him second in his category, high enough to go to state, but not to ISEF. His project was named Best Overall by the Army judges, but I don’t know if this is considered a major achievement.</p>
<p>Questions: (1) Is this significant enough to report to the colleges where admissions and scholarship decisions are still pending? I doubt if Stanford will be impressed. Everyone else…not sure. (2) At what point is it too late for new information like this to make a difference?</p>
<p>Thanks, hope everyone’s having a nice Sunday.</p>
<p>^That’s great! Congrats.</p>
<p>I think it’s significant enough to report. I don’t know when it’s too late but I would take the attitude that ‘it’s not over til it’s over.’ I’ve heard of kids on wait lists that send in new accomplishments and get off the wait list. You don’t know until you try.</p>