What colleges can these grades get me into?

College Search & Selection
1

My school calculates GPA different than most I believe, so to avoid confusion and provide clarity, I’ll list every grade through junior year (some projected).

I understand that this is only a small portion of what college’s consider, but I’d like to know what schools would be possible with these grades, as well as safety and reach schools. (Also, if anybody could show me how to convert these to the most commonly used form of GPA, that’d be great.)

My freshman grades were quite poor, as were my sophomore ones, but there is an obvious trend.

*Denotes required, half-year courses

Freshman Year:
Honors Spanish: 90
Honors Biology: 90
Honors Algebra 2: 97
Honors World History: 90
Honors Engineering: 87
Honors English: 93
Band: 99
*Gym: 89
*Health: 89

Sophomore Year:
Honors Spanish: 94
Honors Pre-Calculus: 97
Honors English: 97
AP Biology: 92
AP Statistics: 97
AP World History: 94
Band: 97
*Gym: 98
*Personal Finance: 98

Junior Year:
Honors Spanish: 98
Honors Band: 99
AP Physics I: 97
AP Calculus AB: 99
AP US History: 98
AP Microeconomics: 99
AP Human Geography: 98
AP English Literature: 97

2

There are something like 3000 colleges in this country. We’re going to need more to go on.

Where do you live? How far are you willing to travel? What sort of money can you afford? What are you thinking of in terms of a major? How large a school are you thinking of?

3

Your sophomore year grades are not all that poor. These grades give you some chance at nearly all schools. As @bjkmom says, there are thousands of universities in the US and more elsewhere. We are going to know something regarding what you are looking for before we can narrow it down.

4

Ask your Guidance Counsellor for guidelines to convert your school’s percentage grades to a unweighted GPA (4.0 scale). Or try using an online converter such as this one:
https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/grade/gpa-to-letter-grade-calculator.html

You can look up average entering GPAs (or GPA distributions) in many schools’ online Common Data Sets (section C) or on sites such as collegedata.com. Those grades should be good enough to help you get in virtually anywhere … but yes, colleges do consider many other factors.

5

They’re not going to get you into Harvard, but they’ll get you into a good school. What location are you in?

6

I’ll list some schools and ask what my chances would be with these grades at each school, as well as schools at around that same tier (I know that those first two will be extremely difficult)>

University of Pennsylvania
Cornell University
Georgetown University
Carnegie Mellon University
Northeastern University
New York University
Boston University

7

This is COMPLETELY the wrong approach. You need to develop a list of qualities that are important to you and a major, and then ask what schools match those wants. Going on prestige and grades is a great way to be disappointed, because the school won’t match anything you care about.

8

Also need a standardized test score (ACT or SAT).

Any AP test scores ?

9

Yes, think about the kinds of things that YOU would like to study; the kind of place where YOU think YOU would thrive; the kind of place with the people who make YOU the best YOU. Would you be happier at Williams, a great school, with a couple of thousand fellow students and lots of rural all around you? Or at NYU, with tens of thousands of students in Greenwich Village in the middle of Manhattan? Would you prefer Rice in Houston, Texas, or frigid Northwestern? Would you prefer a hands-on, project-oriented urban STEM school like WPI, or a cool public LAC in a fun, funky town, like UNC-Asheville? Or Sewanee in beautiful rural setting?

Will you get out of bed to walk to class if it’s 10 degrees and icy outside? Will you have no interest in Greek life, or is that what you are waiting for? Would you love to be at University of Georgia tailgates next fall? Or does that sound like purgatory? What sounds more appealing: Grinnell in rural Iowa; Reed in Portland; or the University of Chicago? All are “intellectual” schools but in very different places. How much money can your family pay? Will you be best off financially staying in state, or looking for schools where you might have good prospects of receiving generous aid?

A college is a place you’ll live and learn for four years (give or take). It seems reasonable to try to find a place that’s a great fit and is affordable. A choice based on YOU seems much more reasonable than one based on PRESTIGE, i.e. what school one can get into.

I’d suggest figuring out what would be the best for YOU. Then find some schools that might work. Research/visit them. Try to be sure some that will work great and will be a place you can be very confident of admission (safeties). If some work great and happen to be very competitive, it might work out, which is great, if not you’ll have good choices that are good fits for you.

It’s HOW you go to school that’s most important, not WHERE. I guarantee you can go down any ranking to #200. At that school, you will find bright students, great professors, and wonderful staff. And not just at that school either. So think about YOU and what works for YOU, what makes YOU the best person. Try to work from there. Good luck with it!

10

eyemgh,

I agree with the spirit of your post, but lots of students don’t know what their major will be, and several who do might change. Yes, the OP’s list seems prestige-driven, but not entirely so. NYU is a fine school, but it’s much more earthbound than the Ivies. Same with BU. True, both schools have become much more difficult to get into than when I went to school twenty years ago (I still shake my head over Northeastern, which twenty years ago was a commuter school that was no one’s top choice (except for maybe nearby commuters!)).

Plus, for some students prestige is important. You and I might think that is wrongheaded, but let’s remember how seventeen-year-olds think. When I was seventeen, I had no idea that LACs existed. If someone humblebragged that they attended Williams, I would have thought, “What is Williams? A bible school? A beauty school?” Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I knew the names of only famous or large schools. I also knew schools that were in the general midwest area: Marquette, Valparaiso, Drake, Bradley. Other than that, I knew zilch. I figured that I would go to UIUC because that’s where you’re supposed to go.

Thus, the OP can do both. He/she can put together a list of schools that are famous and then do research to see which ones are a good fit: academically, financially, and personally.

That said, OP, you should go to a library or bookstore and check out one of the college guides that profiles 10-15% of all colleges/universities out there. The Fiske Guide and the Princeton Review’s “Best 3xx Colleges” are good places to start. Read some of the profiles. Try and figure out what kind of school you’d like to attend in terms of size, location, and culture. For instance, even though I had no idea that LACs existed, as soon as I found out that they did, that helped me drastically narrow down results. You’ll ultimately do the same.

11

I understand that there are an immeasurable number of factors that go into choosing a college and that the prestige of the school should not necessarily be a priority when selecting which university to attend. However, to act as though the prestige and rankings of certain schools have no merit is completely disingenuous. It is in many cases true that very highly ranked schools will provide an objectively superior education when compared to schools that aren’t nearly as highly ranked or widely regarded as one of the best colleges in the nation. Ergo, while I’m not trying to use this post to create a list of colleges (as I recognize that that would be very imprudent), I am trying to see what sort of schools I could attend in terms of national ranking, which is an important thing to know when creating a list of schools.

Additionally, I am still very unsure about what my major will be when I attend a university. I have exhibited talent in mathematics throughout my whole life, which lends to me putting Carnegie Mellon on the list of schools in my last post. Despite this, however, I have also taken a heavy interest into politics outside of school, and have spent a great deal of time learning about political ideology and the pragmatic implications of each ideology. This has resulted in me putting schools such as UPenn and Georgetown in my last post.

What I hope this post clarifies is that I still don’t know what major I will choose, and when I do choose one, I acknowledge that I will have to select a school that fits for that major, as well as one that will provide the best overall academic experience, which is something that is created from a variety from factors. I’m not choosing a school or even making a list of schools just based off of their rankings, however, I would like to know what “tier” of schools I would have a good shot at getting by into with the aforementioned grades. You can refer back to my last post for some schools that I had listed.

12

@“Constantine the Great” Just to give you some sense where you might stand: Someone I know had slightly better grades freshman year of high school, almost identical grades to you with very similar course rigor sophomore year, and not quite as good grades (but still straight A’s) Junior year. She got into both BU and Northeastern, but with no aid.

Where she went instead (a New England state flagship) was a much better fit for her, somewhat less expensive, and had significantly better programs in what she ended up majoring in, even if none of the New England flagships are quite as highly ranked as BU and NEU.

She also got into McGill, which if your SAT and references are good, assuming your grades stay the same, would be almost a safety with your grades (they don’t care about freshman year grades).

I would take the top three on your list as reaches, but sensible reaches with your stats.

However, whether any of the schools on your list from Post # 5 would actually end up being a good fit for you is very hard to say. To me there seems to be three main issues: Figuring out what is a good fit for you; Figuring out what you can afford and finding schools that fit this; Finding true safeties.

13

Your grades would give you at least a fair to good chance of acceptance at at least some schools within the top ~50 nationally (as defined by selectivity, and as measured roughly below):

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-50-smartest-colleges-in-america-2016-10

14

It is simply not true that highly ranked schools objectively provide better education. USNWR doesn’t have a single measure of student outcomes in their algorithm. They use mostly institutional reputation which is built by the doctoral programs. Rankings are HIGHLY flawed.

It is also not disingenuous to suggest that rankings have no merit. My highly qualified son placed no emphasis on rankings…ZERO.

He instead made a list of academic and non-academic qualities that he was interested in, and then formed a list around those.

Given the bill of goods we’ve all been sold about rankings and prestige, you might find it shocking to look at the lists of the schools where Fulbright Scholars, etc. originate from. It’s not a list of who’s who. It’s a list of who’s that?

Want further evidence? Caltech is the top school on the list linked by @merc81. Not one, but two retired Caltech/JPL professors told my son not to apply because the undergraduate experience was so poor. One said, and I quote “Caltech is not an undergraduate institution.” So much for how representative rankings are.

15

@“Constantine the Great”

Your grades are not poor! Working from a scale that sets 93 as the minimum A grade (some schools use 90 for the minimum 4.0), you have an A- average for freshman year, a solid A for sophomore year, and near A+ (projected) grades for junior year with an impressive lineup of AP courses.

You should not worry about “converting” your grades into a 4 point scale. If anything, % grades are more illustrative (and less forgiving). A 4.0 on a transcript can be anything from 90 to 100%, depending on the school in question. A 97+ provides more impact, IMO.

Your grades show a steady upward trend with increasingly rigorous course selection. Assuming you get competitive test scores (SAT 1450+ or ACT 32+), your application would get a serious look at competitive schools.

Any school with a less than 20% acceptance rate, however, should be considered a reach, no matter how qualified you are.

GPA, is not “a small part of what colleges consider.” It is probably the most important data point.

@TTG and @Hapworth provide excellent advice about how to balance status with fit. Added to the conversation should be cost. If you haven’t yet had the money talk with your parents, do so soon. Run the net price calculators at schools of interest to determine if they will be affordable. Depending on your parents’ ability and willingness to pay, you may adopt a merit scholarship based strategy (which usually means targeting schools where your stats place you in the top 25% of accepted students) or you might be focusing on state flagships with honors programs.

Does your PSAT score put you in contention for National Merit?

Good luck!

16

Discussion of the value of rankings aside, the OP appears to have asked a legitimate question with respect to which colleges may be within his selectivity range:

The bracketing of “tier” by quotation marks, in particular, indicates an awareness that his college of choice may develop through consideration of a variety of factors.

17

Ok, let’s back up. You asked “I’d like to know what schools would be possible with these grades, as well as safety and reach schools.” Thats a broad question, with virtually no context. The short answer is…every school is possible with those grades. The grades alone probably wouldn’t disqualify you from any school. Certainly students with those grades have gotten into, yes, even Harvard.

Reframing, there are schools where admission is not PROBABLE no matter what academic record has been amassed. They receive too many fully qualified applicants for the slots they have. The list of those schools is growing every year due to the self perpetuating, false construct that there’s a relationship between the quality of education, long term success, and a school’s rank.

We still don’t know your full academic record, because we don’t know your test scores.

Given that framework, the question is simply too unfocussed, hence the reason I suggested the approach was wrong. An objective computer, given that input would spit out literally thousands of schools. What use is that?

If you will give a little more information, you could end up with some useful replies.

For example, given the fact that you have a proclivity for math and might be interested in engineering, you should cut the field to the just under 600 schools that have engineering. You can easily switch out of engineering, but the moment you switch into engineering, you will be at the beginning of a 4 year journey (assuming a switch from almost anything except physics). You can cross reference that with schools that have political science programs. Round that out by eliminating those where the barrier to switching majors is high and you have a start.

Next, do you have any geographic preferences? Ideal weather? School size? Urban, suburban or rural? What are your non-academic intetests? Do you like to hike? Ski? Theater? Big time athletics? Shopping?

Once you determine what intangibles are important to you, then and only then, if rank and prestige are important to you, add them into the equation. Otherwise, you risk landing at a program you will hate.

Good luck.

18

What are your SAT/ACT scores? You can have a high GPA, but if your test scores are low that will affect your chances of admission.

19

Because of your interest in the math direction and the poly sci directions I would add Tufts University to you list. It offers solid math, science, engineering, law and political science directions with interdisciplinary approaches. :bz

20

At this point any university and LAC in the 40-125 range is possible.
For schools in the top 40, a high sat/act score and excellent to exceptional ECs will matter a lot. Do you have your PSAT score?
If you score in the top 25% for standardized testing, colleges in the 75-125 bracket would be safeties.
However you can’t just consider whether you can get into a college. You must also make sure it’s affordable. Therefore you need to take a couple colleges in the top 40, a couple in the 40-75, and a couple in the 75-125 bracket, both from the national University and LAC list, and run the net price calculator on every one. That should give you a list of 10-15 college’s net price. Being those results to your parents: which ones can they afford from current income and savings? If they’ve not started saving, can they start putting aside how much they think they can set aside when you’re in college, as practice for the family so that you can mesure the sacrifice they will do for your college, and so they some money is saved for you. If none of the colleges are affordable, you’ll need to change strategy and figure out how you can find affordable colleges.