I used to think my ECs were pretty decent (for a UK applicant) but I heard US Colleges put a lot more weight on ECs than UK unis and now I am starting to get very worried. And everyone on here has such brilliant ECs!
So what are the colleges that don’t look at ECs as much as the others (for example, I heard UPenn put a heavy weight on ECs)
thank you!
Hard to say, but most state schools and large regional colleges put the vast majority of emphasis on test scores and gpa because they tend to deal with larger applicant pools and have more available spots. Practically every top 50 school puts enough emphasis on ECs to be able to weed out the high stat kids who aren’t well-rounded.
The most selective schools have far more high stat applicants than they can admit*, so they use various other criteria to select between them.
*This is due to a few reasons: (a) the US high school graduate population is quite large relative to the number of students that they can admit, and (b) the usual academic stats (courses, grades, standardized test scores) used in the US have low ceilings relative to those use in some other countries, and these ceilings can vary considerably by high school. So lots of applicants are close to the maximum on US high school academic stats.