<p>for instance,</p>
<p>if you had like a 3.6 with a 32 ACT</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>a 3.9+ with a 27 ACT.</p>
<p>this is excluding all extra curriculars and college essays/recomendations.</p>
<p>It all depends. A low GPA is a lot easier to justify than a low ACT. I am justifying my low GPA in the setback essay. hopefully it works and GO BLUE!</p>
<p>^I wouldn’t say that MechiganBoy … if you go through the results thread I believe a few people with a low GPA (3.4/3.5-ish) and quite a high SAT score (we’re talking about a 2300-ish) got deferred … but I can’t remember if they were OOS. </p>
<p>But no matter what if you’re in this position you should make sure your essays are great and turn in your app ASAP and hope for the best. As for your case scenarios, it is possible to get into UMich in both cases, but don’t count on admission.</p>
<p>Also, if it helps, look at this eval sheet the UG admit office uses: <a href=“http://www.admissions.umich.edu/docs/Freshman_Application_Rating_Sheet.pdf[/url]”>http://www.admissions.umich.edu/docs/Freshman_Application_Rating_Sheet.pdf</a></p>
<p>Good luck, and GO BLUE!</p>
<p>this is a complete guess, as any answer to this question cant be backed up without contacting an admissions officer, but from what i have seen gpa seems to be the most important factor for michigan. Go Blue!!!</p>
<p>at any school, i would say gpa is weighted over act, simply because gpa reflects your work over 4 years, rather than a few hours. a high gpa and a low act shows a bad morning or poor test-taking skills, whereas the opposite shows intelligence but a lack of work ethic (counting out outlying circumstances like parents contracting cancer), which colleges really don’t want.</p>
<p>^But then you need to consider that GPA works differently at each school. At one school, it may be very easy to get a 4.0, but other schools, it may be very hard to get one (I’ve heard of schools that graduate classes with one or two 4.0s and then the next highest is a 3.9 or something like that). Colleges still think standardized tests are kinda important, because it gives them a clue about how a high school is like … even if people can study specifically for those tests b/c those tests are so study-able.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Michigan tries to account for the difference by recalculating your GPA, but that doesn’t do much to account for the school environment … which then they may resort to the HS ranking (and even that doesn’t provide a clear picture because some schools like magnet schools in CA are highly competitive, while others aren’t so competitive)</p>
<p>I went and talked to a counselor about admissions when i was in Ann Arbor. The process is so mysterious. But one thing I got out of it thst is kinda mentioned by ab2013 is they look at how you did in your enviroment. if you had a higher average ACT than your school by say 2 or 3 points, they like that. So hopefully you were “accelling in your enviroment”</p>
<p>High GPA is for sure more important. I got to have dinner with someone from admissions at my orientation session and she told me the priorities are GPA first, your course load, your test scores, your essays, and your extracurriculars. Someone asked what they really looked for in the essays and she said, “Oh nothing in particular, it’s not really that hard to get in.” FUNNY LADY!</p>
<p>GPA doesn’t necessarily “prove intelligence”. I know some pretty stupid people with high gpas…it’s usually a reflection of different things. Test scores also dont necessarily prove intelligence…they can sometimes prove it, or they can be a testament to how much someone prepares/test taking ability. Basically, high school is pointless :)</p>
<p>Yeah I never really knew how much students study for the ACT, prep books etc… I’ve done none of either, though I’m debating if I should study for the ACT in september, since I plan to take it then. I also know a student ( well informed about one during school) who just completely guess on the ACT and got a 29…</p>
<p>You don’t need to study like, math, science, etc, but I would advise you to take a few practice tests to be prepared for the format of the test. That alone increased my score by six points, and the second time I took the ACT I hadn’t taken any courses in the subjects tested in a couple years.</p>
<p>However wouldn’t the quality of the school also be a factor as well as the difficulty of the cirriculum?</p>
<p>You betcha it would.</p>
<p>“I also know a student ( well informed about one during school) who just completely guess on the ACT and got a 29”</p>
<p>coolbreeze you are so full of shyt… this is bullcrap beyond belief. Don’t try to justify you low score by invalidating a test.</p>
<p>Let’s see, there’s on average a 1/4 chance that a student get the question right purely guessing (no points off for wrong answer)… let’s see that equates to an average score of about 17 if you only get one out of four questions correct.</p>
<p>ACT’s population standard deviation is around 3. Since we have the population standard deviation, we can use a z-test instead of a t-test.</p>
<p>So we have sigma = 3, mu = 17, y= 29…</p>
<p>z-value is 4.00, which also equates to a probability of 0.0000316, which means out of 100000 people who COMPLETELY guessed their ansewrs, 3 of them would achieve that score. It’s either your friend happen to the luck he needed to win a fairly big lottery, or you made crap up. I am leaning towards to latter.</p>
<p>to put this z-value in perspective. In criminal court, if the DA can come up with a z-value of 3.00 that you commited a murder, it is enough to get your butt tossed in jail.</p>
<p>Bearcats, I think your information is off. 25% correct should give you about a 12 (assuming ACT without essay), and the standard deviation is more like 5 (it’s pretty far off of a bell curve). Still should be a z-score of 3.4 or so though. That’s about a 1 in 3000 chance.</p>
<p>Though can this be done at all, considering that the percent of questions correct does not fit exactly inline with the score (I don’t know the term for it, but you know what I mean).</p>
<p>I never knew stats very well.</p>
<p>the SD is 4.7. </p>
<p>[Measurements</a> of Position](<a href=“http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/math/webtexts/stat07.htm]Measurements”>http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/math/webtexts/stat07.htm)</p>
<p>and yea 25% should be a 12! not 17… I was using an old table…</p>
<p>You dont need a bell curve because the sample size is huge. As we always say in stats, if the samplesize is greater than 100, assume normal distribution.</p>
<p>so let’s redo calculation</p>
<p>y = 29
mu = 12
sigma = 4.7</p>
<p>z = 3.61</p>
<p>p value = 0.000153… yea… around 1.5 people per 10000 who completely guessed their ACT…</p>