<p>OP: Is his less than stellar GPA the result of low grades in freshman year? Some schools including some really good ones, like Stanford, will disregard or at least downplay freshman year grades. If his junior yr grades are really good the GPA won’t hurt him as much.</p>
<p>vicariousparent: S’s grades were significantly lower sophomore year than freshman year. Junior year grades so far are in-between the first two years. </p>
<p>He is taking a very rigorous course load with 5 out of 7 classes either Honors or AP each year, making his weighted GPA a bit above 4.1. It would not be possible to have more Honors/AP classes since PE is required and foreign language is only offered Honors or AP the 4th year. His school gives a +1 weight for Honors or AP classes. When I see stats posted on CC, the difference between W and UW GPAs are frequently much smaller, so I guess other schools give less of a weighting differential.</p>
<p>I don’t think there is any “top school” that values test scores over GPA, although there are plenty of very good schools for which the OP’s sone would be a fine candidate (including lots of the ones mentioned already). The University of Chicago was certainly one of them in the past, but it is something of a moving target, admissions-wise – it looked very different four years ago with a ~40% admission rate than it did this year with a ~25% admission rate. A number of public universities (including relatively small ones) use more or less explicit GPA/SAT matrices to admit students, and a 3.5/35 student would be in like Flynn at lots of them. Most of them have honors programs, too, that are intended to address the OP’s concerns. It’s worth checking out and thinking about them.</p>
<p>I fear, though, that someone like the OP’s son is simply stuck in Admissions Purgatory, with no magic solution. He COULD get in anywhere, but he will have a less-than-even chance at lots of the schools he likes. So . . . follow the rules, love thy safety (if he likes Richmond, that probably works), don’t get hung up on Cornell, etc. And try to apply places that other students at his school aren’t applying, i.e., LACs not in the Northeast. A place like Carleton is tougher than the posts above indicate, but he may have a better chance there than at Middlebury. Reed is a great idea.</p>
<p>My S, who is graduating this summer, had very similar stats and attends a similar very competitive high school with the most rigorous courseload. So I am very familiar with this situation. We also have lots of info on our school’s naviance. We found many of the OOS State schools put a lot of weight on the SAT. Schools such as Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana’s top-ranked Kelley business school, the Canadian and overseas schools, such a McGill and St. Andrews. I think he has a good shot at GWU, as their admissions are holistic and they balance SAT/GPA. A good shot at Richmond, as well. There is some slight flexibility at Duke, UChicago and WUSTL. At our school we have found Vassar, Middlebury and Tufts to be very GPA focused, except when it comes to athletic recruits. Greek at Richmond is BIG and you said you didn’t want that. Since you don’t want big and impersonal that eliminates the OOS state and McGill. I’d say GWU might be your best shot. You always have the ED option at GWU, that gives you a significant boost.</p>
<p>Don’t know about now, but in the past Lafayette had a very strong Greek presence.</p>
<p>Lafayette does not have a particularly strong Greek presence. About 30% of students are Greek, and may be dropping further as one of the fraternities there may be on the way out. When Lafayette went coed in the 1070s there were 19 fraternities, but that is now down to 6 (possibly 5 by next year).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I can think of one. The University of Oxford. According to their web site, the basic qualification for USA applicants is simple: an SAT1 combined score of 2100 or above, plus 700 or above on a couple of SAT2 or AP exams.</p>
<p>Those scores qualify you for a required interview, where you can expect deep thought-provoking questions according to a couple posters on another thread.</p>
<p>Maybe someone else can weigh in on the details of their process, but they don’t seem to get their knickers in much of a twist over GPA, let alone ecs, recommendations etc. It would be fun to discover that a bright CC’er is good enough for Oxford, but not good enough for some New England LAC.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Right, that’s about all I meant to suggest, too (not that Carleton is easy).</p>
<p>tk21769: Somehow I have gotten the impression that the requirements for American students applying to Oxford are a little tougher than that to meet. In any event, I know a bunch of kids who have applied, and as far as I can tell Oxford and Harvard reach pretty much the same conclusions based on whatever it is they look at.</p>
<p>We have a worse situation…my son’s combined SAT is 2080 and his GPA is a 3.2—weighted! His is accelerated but is not taking the “most rigorous” courseload because his grades (almost all Bs, B minuses, B pluses…two Cs in honors courses) won’t let him into the honors/AP courses. He is accelerated in math and science and is currently in calculus. (He took three honors courses as a freshman and grades ranged from C plus in English to B plus in History. He took one honors course in sophomore year…Chemistry…and got a C. This year he is in regular Physics and getting an A.)</p>
<p>We have no idea where he will get in and his wake-up call has come too late. He is now committed to working (and really, he had hardly worked prior to the wake up call) and I’m sure college will be very different than high school. But there is no way to tell a school this. </p>
<p>He has great ECs (student government all years and four year varsity athlete) but again, those have little impact when you have a 3.2 GPA.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, I would not assume the interview is a cake walk by any means.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It is precisely at the top schools that test scores are more influential than grades.
That’s because test-score variation is wide and grade variation is narrow in that applicant pool.</p>
<p>Statisticians might ask whether “test-score variance explains more of admissions variance than
does GPA variance” in a regression model, or whether test-score information alone is more correlated with admissions
results than GPA information alone. The answer should be YES at top schools, because the grade range is quite compressed. </p>
<p>For instance, the Princeton admissions studies (Espenshade, Chung & Walling) found that there was a strong effect of SAT above 1500, and one sees the same thing in the graphs of admission rate by SAT score in the Early Admissions Game and Revealed Preferences studies. Most of those applicants had quite high grades.</p>
<p>ReadyToRoll, I have a friend whose son sounds like yours. He had a smililar GPA and perfect SAT scores. (Though this was before the writing test.) He got a lot of waitlists and rejections, though Binghamton offered him a full ride. He ended up at Colby off the waitlist. He’s done pretty well there, though only after he figured out he wasn’t cut out to major in math. He took a year off in the middle of college which did seem to help with the growing up process.</p>
<p>Unless you are an athlete or have a URM hook you really need to be in the top 10% to get into the Ivy’s, Georgetowns, Dukes, etc. along with other stellar stats. My sister got into Cornell with CR740 and CM 580 but she was 3rd in her class and had great everything else. It actually might hurt you to have good test scores and not have the GPA to go along with it because that might indicate an underachiever to the adcoms. You might want to take a look at the University of Rochester.</p>
<p>Thanks mathmom…other issue is that he wants a big school and we think we need a public school (though OOS is okay) and those schools are (A) Less impressed by ECs and (B) Accepting higher level kids than before due to the economy. There are certain public schools that GC says would be safeties, but my son’s perception is that, “That’s where all the dumb kids go”. Remember…this was a CTY kid…likes to be around other kids like this but now won’t be able to do so…</p>
<p>I second the Oxbridge advice. A few years ago I intereviewed (as an alum) a young woman who was incredibly impressive in the interview. She didn’t get into my alma mater or other top US schools, but did get into Oxford. She was National Merit commended rather than semi-finalist or finalist. She attended one of NYC’s public magnets, and wasn’t at the top of her class. However, she had LOTS of AP courses related to her intended course of study and had 5s on all of them. And, as I wrote, she was incredibly impressive in the interview. I felt as if I were talking to someone 25 rather than 17–very mature, very focused, knew exactly what she wanted. </p>
<p>I’m not saying it’s easier to get into Oxbridge than a top US college–it isn’t. It’s just that the criteria are different and sometimes that difference plays to a kid’s strengths. </p>
<p>If your son is willing to look out of the Northeast/Atlantic, I’d suggest Claremont McKenna. While he may think it’s too small, when you add together all the Claremont colleges, it isn’t. It sounds like what he is looking for. I think you’ll find that colleges which are further away can be easier to commute home from if they are close to a major airport.</p>
<p>There is a good thread that you might be interested in on one of the forums…can’t remember if it’s parent forum or admissions. It is full of postings by this year’s applicants, talking about where they were accepted with gpas less that 3.7. Lots of good, encouraging information there, it seems. Don’t give up hope!</p>
<p>What colleges say they value more can be opposite to the measured effects of their admissions policies. </p>
<p>For instance, Alon and Tienda in their series of statistical studies on minority admission at selective schools, found that the admissions weight of test scores exceeds that of grades as measured by class rank, and that the absolute and relative gap in those weights has been growing over time:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The paper is at: </p>
<p>Alon, Sigal and Marta Tienda. 2007. “Diversity, Opportunity and the Shifting Meritocracy in Higher Education.” American Sociological Review, 72(4):487-511.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.tau.ac.il/~salon1/s1.pdf[/url]”>http://www.tau.ac.il/~salon1/s1.pdf</a></p>
<p>Look at Carnegie Mellon if he is ok with a tech school. They don’t seem to care about grades if the SATs are there. On the scattergram I saw, above 2100 or so they let in around half of applicants regardless of GPA. CMU would be my goal if money wasn’t an issue.</p>
<p>I’m in a similar situation - 2350 SAT, but ranked in the second decile. Hoping to get into USC, if NMF comes through.</p>
<p>Not being in the top 10% is a real problem, because that is part of the USNews formula. If he were 9% he’d be a shoe-in at any school looking to increase its SAT average.</p>
<p>Try Dickinson, Bucknell, Pitt. </p>
<p>And Rutgers, although that’s probably a given.</p>
<p>And you might also want to try school that are far away from home (if everyone can handle it) because he’ll offer geographic diversity. Reed might be a place to try, for that reason alone.</p>