<p>What's with the people who are NOT:
-minority
-from a poor family
-has financial issues
-has a death or something bad happen to the family</p>
<p>with like a really bad grade (below 3.3 or something I mean) get into schools like:
-Stanford
-Harvard + any other ivy league schools
-Duke
-etc.</p>
<p>Why are they special? Is it possible to do something amazing with your extra curricular to "cover up" those grades? Like if you get a 36 on ACT and cure AIDS or something? (maybe not that extreme but yeahhh along those lines....)</p>
<p>What do you mean? Where are you seeing kids with a 3.3 get into Stanford and ivies who are not hooked? That certainly isn’t happening in my neighborhood!</p>
<p>welll of course these people are exceptions of some sort. Usually they don’t make up more than 1 to 4 percent of the entire campus population. but if schools like stanford admit around 2000 kids or something that means 4 percent is eighty people. sixty people multiplied by (harvard, duke, brown, stanford, princeton, yale, upenn, mit, cal tech, dartmouth, cornell, columbia, and even oxford and cambridge) that’s eighty people times fourteen. That’s a thousand people among hundreds of thousands but they must be special for some reason…</p>
<p>yes there are very, very few of these types of people, but I just never understood those “success stories” and why some of these people are exceptions. (because they most certainly did not have any of the factors above including URM or being athletes)</p>
<p>oh and in case someone else brings this up, the people i’ve heard about didn’t have legacies either.</p>
<p>Here let me give an example…</p>
<p>This one kid made a patent at his engineering class, he had around a 3.1 gpa but his technology was so amazing that steve jobs wanted to buy it from him. Instead of taking the money he suggested that steve jobs should write him a letter of rec. Now he’s at MIT. So when people say extra curriculars cannot overshadow grades, i’m really confused because clearly what this child did was technically considered an “extra curricular”… </p>
<p>I dont know if your examples are real or made up, but i think you would have trouble finding 1-4% of the student body of a top school that fits that sort of description. </p>
<p>Sorry, but I think you are just tossing out ‘facts’ and asking us to explain them to you.</p>
<p>STANFORD:
Percent who had GPA of 3.75 and higher: 91.13
Percent who had GPA of between 3.50 and 3.74: 6.53
Percent who had GPA between 3.25 and 3.49: 1.92
Percent who had GPA between 3.00 and 3.24: 0.35
Percent who had GPA between 2.50 amd 2.99: 0.07%</p>
<p>It came from this site:
<a href="http://colleges..com/colleges/admissions/princeton_university/186131.aspx%5B/url%5D">http://colleges..com/colleges/admissions/princeton_university/186131.aspx</a></p>
<p>These were only a few of the ones that I saw.
and the people who made it were upperclassmen from my school’s district and they have been featured in our news for their successes. </p>
<p>All i’m trying to do is clarify information. I would not waste my time nor anyone else’s time giving ridiculous statistics with made up facts that simply aren’t true. I think that it’s just there are very very few of these exceptions, but to me there was no explanation for them.</p>
<p>After all, what would i get out of lying? Encourage others to try? I mean of course other applicants should try regardless if they really wanted to go to that specific school but it would serve no purpose to harm or help anyone by just clarifying some information.</p>
<p>So, you take these stats, but then think they are not legacy, or urm or athletes? how did you come up with that? and with Stanford, those grades are unweighted. you just do not know how what they would be like weighted.</p>
<p>There are all sorts of stories. The kids under 3.0? .07 of 1 precent. 1 person. Might have been sick a year, or some other story. Less than 2.5 percent are less than 3.5, and you can be sure most of that 2.5% are going to be closer to 3.5 than not. </p>
<p>I am not sure what you are asking, what you are trying to learn, and where you are projecting or speculating.</p>
<p>I do know two kids who made it into top schools with mediocre GPAs, but they both did very well in International Olympiads (academic, not saying which ones…) and deserve to be in top schools, because it is obvious that they are that brilliant, but they also got turned down by some big names. They also got turned down by some top schools. Adcoms are often willing to take risks on the obviously brilliant. </p>
<p>In your case, you are just not going to find out until you actually apply. There is no secret handshake.</p>
<p>OP – your post is a torrential flood of illogic and non sequiturs.</p>
<p>ATHLETES. Is that so hard to understand? Roughly 10% of the students at small colleges are recruited varsity athletes. Roughtly 6-7% at a slightly larger college like Stanford.</p>
<p>thank you for all of your responses! They have really helped me clarify a lot of information! good luck to everyone else who will be applying to college!</p>
<p>Didn’t you know? You have to be a hispanic female widower with 7 children living in a half bedroom apartment living on welfare whom works 5 jobs and struggles to take 9 AP courses per semester while maintaining a 4.5/4 GPA who just discovered the cure for cancer while being blind and deaf having to communicate by clapping.</p>