<p>When should one not apply EA? More specific to my situation: If I believe my first semester senior grades will significantly improve my unweighted GPA (which is not all that great), should I apply RD instead? I do have a reason for my crappy freshman grades, but I am not sure what to do.</p>
<p>As far as I can tell, the reasons not to apply EA to a college like MIT are pretty limited -- you can't decide whether you want to applyat all, you need to take additional tests after the application deadline, you want a recommendation from a first semester teacher who can't really give it until the end of the semester, you can't tell your story effectively without some element that won't be present until later in the fall, you want to apply early to another college (Stanford, Yale, Brown) whose rules preclude a simultaneous early application to MIT.</p>
<p>If the issue is your 9th grade grades, and your 11th grade grades are pretty uniformly great, then I don't think waiting for first-semester 12th grade grades adds a whole lot to your story. If MIT wants further confirmation that you have overcome whatever academic issues you had three years ago, it will defer you and look at those fall grades, but you will be no worse off for having applied EA. If it rejects you, you can assume it would have rejected you with great fall grades, too. On the other hand, if you really need the fall grades to show a complete recovery, and it's not just a matter of further diluting the effect of 9th grade on your average, then you should probably wait.</p>
<p>(By the way, I don't know how MIT looks at 9th grade. Some colleges discount it heavily or disregard it altogether. Others count it equally. I'm sure that no matter what MIT does in its internal analysis, the people there intend to be sensitive to situations like yours, where a student actually learns and gets better after some initial problems. The story "I made some mistakes but learned from them and got much stronger" is a very good one for college admissions, provided that your record supports the "got much stronger" part. You will have to make the judgment how much an extra semester of grades will be needed to show that. But don't just base it on GPA.)</p>