How hard are they to achieve if you’re a (slightly) above average student with several good EC? What GPA is favorable for these schools?
You can’t generalize. You need to give your stats, including test scores, and some school names.
If you want to analyze each school, Google “Common Data Set” and the college name. Look at the most recent year. You can see info on test score ranges and class rank.
Acceptance rates don’t tell the whole story. For example, Notre Dame has a 20% acceptance rate but the middle 50% in the ACT is 32 - 34 and 75% of students are in the top 5% of their class.
Generally, schools with 20% - 30% acceptance rates are accepting A - students with test scores in the top 5%.
Slightly above average would not get you in one of these schools.
Which in particular are you looking at?
thank you. what uw GPA (out of 4) do they generally favor?
I’m asking b/c that’s the only system my school uses to calculate grades
3.7 unweighted but again that is in general. Others could be far higher with test scores in the top 2 - 3% of all students.
Boston College has a 35% acceptance rate and slightly above average students do not get accepted. You have to have a great gpa and great test scores.
Minimum would probably be 3.75 with a 3.9+ being helpful
Many schools with 30-40% acceptance rates still have SAT scores in the 1820 - 2210 range (25% to 75%) and 71% of the class is in the top 10% of their high school class.
If you are in that type of slightly above average … you might be favorable.
Notre Dame with about a 20% acceptance rate is even higher, 2000 to 2280 for SATs, 90% in the top 10%
The two common data sets I looked at didn’t include GPAs but to be in the top 10% of a competitive school I would think requires a unweighted GPA well over 3.7 and weighted likely over 4.
If you are more average, there are some threads that you should look at, like one for GPAs of 3.3 or whatever.
Acceptance rates go up and the self-selected applicant pool stats go down, so you probably should start in the 60s on USNWR and keep moving down until you hit the sweet spot for you. Your SATs scores should be in the top 50% and rank in top 50% to make you a competitive applicant in highly selective schools, or you can use this as a reach and find better match (50% and up) and safety (75% and up) schools to apply to.