I’m applying to Yale through the Common App. I have stellar IGCSE/A-Level grades, with A*/As throughout. But they also require an official high school transcript, and my internal school grades are… er, interesting. I tend to slack off during the term and then make up for it by studying super hard for the board exams. I was wondering if this would be enough of a reason to automatically get rejected? I would hate for that, because Yale seems like such a good school and all of my board exam grades are excellent. Please help!
If it makes any difference, the subject that I have a particular talent for, and the one which is the core of almost all my extracurriculars and the one I have several awards for, is also the only one in which I have excellent grades in in the semester scores. Would this be enough to not automatically send me into the reject pile?
I agree with @T26E4. From your own description you don’t sound very well rounded. The fact that you admit to slacking off and only doing well on exams probably won’t get you a very good teacher/counselor recommendation. If you see this fault in yourself, I am sure others see it too. Your chances for admission don’t seem great based on the info you provided.
Why would Yale admit a self-proclaimed slacker over a student who has demonstrated they are a hard worker over the long haul? Like @T26E4 and @TPerry1982, I don’t see it happening.
For what it’s worth (not very much), I don’t have the same reaction as my fellow parents. If you have a lot of talent (and verified achievement) in some significant academic area, and you have proved the ability to get top marks on your A-Levels in all subjects, I don’t think you would be rejected out of hand. You would need to find teachers to attest to your brilliance convincingly, and write impressive essays. Yes, it would be a long shot, but I don’t have the same sort of revulsion the others seems to have.
Gibby’s daughter’s transcript is completely irrelevant. She was a hard worker and an excellent performer at one of the most competitive high schools in the country. No one would have told her that she was not a good candidate for Yale. She didn’t have the benefit of A-levels to show her academic achievement on a standard scale, although given her particular school that hardly mattered.
You seem to have been raised in a system like that of most of the world, where internal grades are meaningless. Admissions officers, I think, are capable of understanding that. You don’t have to be doing all of the busywork and sucking up to the teachers all of the time if you are in fact learning what you have to learn and growing as a scholar, thinker, and doer, even if the norm for high achieving American high school students is never missing a quiz. If anything, you may well look like someone who needed more challenge than school was giving him or her, and if your extracurricular and quasi-curricular activities make it look like you weren’t just vegging out during the school year, you could be a perfectly viable candidate. That doesn’t mean you will be accepted, but I wouldn’t discourage you from applying.
@T26E4@Tperry1982@gibby I appreciate your input, but I’ll have to respectfully disagree. The reason I ‘slacked off’ on exams is due to the fact that in my country, internal school exams are given virtually no importance and we are encouraged to think of them as mere ‘practice tests’ for the real thing. In fact, at my most recent school they did not even keep a record of mid-term or mock exam scores, a problem I’m still trying to get past in my counselor’s report.
Even so, please believe me when I say I’ve worked as hard as I could these past few years, and have managed to attain more A-Levels than regular students do, and international recognition in the field I am most interested in. Which is why I would hate for my official transcript to set me back, especially because I was told they did not need it from a country with a curriculum such as mine.
As for the teacher recommendations, I’m sure they are going to be excellent, as they all know me well and are proud of my achievements. I’ve had a few pull me aside specifically and tell me that, as well as a few that talk about me to their other classes praisingly, so I know they hold me in high esteem.
I am aware that my chances are not high, but then again, the admission rates are so low, it’s practically impossible to tell whose chances ARE high.
@JHS Thank you for your reply. You are right in assuming that I was raised in a system where internal grades were meaningless. Yale has seemed so perfect in so many ways, and I’d hate to not even be given a shot based on something I wasn’t even aware mattered. I was under the impression that all I needed were brilliant board exam grades, which I have. I will try and make the rest of my application shine, however, and hope for the best.
The AOs are familiar with the educational systems in other countries, as they are with the widely different school systems in the US. If you have achieved documented international recognition in your field, that’s something to highlight.
I don’t have a revulsion for the OP, just giving a reality check. He/she can apply anywhere they want. I hope my school would not admit someone who admits they are a slacker. If they had posted that they had an uneven high school record, that they excelled in some things and not in others, I would have had a different answer. I am reacting to their own admission that they are a slacker, nothing else.
And yes, a transcript does not tell the whole story. Some students from disadvantaged backgrounds may not have the stellar transcripts and extra curricular activities as their more well off counterparts. However, I am sure there is a teacher or counselor that will attest to the fact that they are the hardest worker they know and that they do some much with the little that they have available to them. Yale admits candidates like this all the time as evidenced by the number of Questbridge Scholars in each class. I am always accused of being blunt, nothing is different here.
I will observe that there are some present (and past) Yale students who sometimes slack off during the semester, and then work really hard on the final exam or final paper. Ahem.
I’m from a country that follows the UK A-levels system. Although majority of my school ends up with outstanding A levels, most are like you, in that they do not score well in internal exams (not so much because of laziness, but usually because the internal exams are harder than the A levels). Even so, because of the sheer difficulty of competing as an international against so many brilliant peers, few (if any at all) applicants have been accepted to a top tier school without consistently good internal results.
When they look at poor internal results, depending on the context of the school, they come up with two conclusions - either you’re slacking and not truly dedicated/interested in learning, or you are struggling with a rigorous curriculum, and they’re more likely to admit someone who could manage the difficult curriculum.
@Tperry1982 That’s alright, I didn’t word it carefully enough either. I see now that I shouldn’t have chosen the word ‘slacker’ as it does not a truly represent me, but I mistakenly thought it would suffice instead of further elaboration with specific details.
@aznraffe Thank you for the insight! I can definitely see how they would come to those conclusions, but I wish they’d consider a third - simply that internal exams aren’t put on that pedestal in international countries that they are in the US. It’s not so much that I slacked off during the year or couldn’t keep up with the curriculum - in fact I found some of it ridiculously easy - but the fact is that for some of them I didn’t even show up so that I’d have more time to revise. On my teachers’ advice, nonetheless. Perhaps it wasn’t the most kosher advice, but we were encouraged to think of those exams more as personal assessments as anything else, and I’m not going to lie, sometimes I would be preparing for an entirely different subject than the one that would be tested at school, just because the board exam date for it was closer.
Of course, at the end of the day these are all excuses and I should’ve been more careful and it might just end up costing me the opportunity to study at a top college outside my country. Lesson learned, but I can’t help but wish I’d been advised about this earlier. Maybe I’ll contact my previous school’s officials and suggest they set up an educational workshop at the start of 9th grade regarding overseas admissions and their requirements. In any case, I’d like to thank everyone for their reply!
@TheIvyClub If that really is the culture at your school (ie skipping internals advised by teachers), you could ask your counselor to write a letter explaining that and send it to schools - I don’t know how much it would help though.
@aznraffe That’s not a bad idea, though I wonder if they’d be hesitant to put that on an official letter. Still, I’ll drop in and ask. Even if it doesn’t do much, it might possibly help explain the discrepancy between my scores to the admissions officers. Thank you!
Know how many are lined up who did take it seriously, who don’t need to “explain?” Just having a couple of aces in the hole isn’t it. Anyone applying to a tippy top should know the competition is fierce. And really, should be savvy enough to have researched what the school looks for.
I have no idea what “interesting” grades are. But they represent your effort. I don’t think you gain with an elite by having some letter explain you or teachers didn’t think ongoing attention to classwork mattered as much as standardized tests. How can that be, when they didn’t give you A’s. They expected something for an A.
@lookingforward in OP’s defense, it’s the default assumption for many people who follow the A-level system that unis only care about GCSE/AS/A level grades, because that’s how it works for UK unis/unis in countries that follow A-level system - school transcript is pretty much irrelevant to oxbridge, for example. Internationals probably decide later (say in junior year) that they’re interested in applying to US colleges and do their research, and by then it may be too late to save your transcript.
That said, I stand by my personal experience from my country - top schools seldom admit those with questionable transcripts regardless of final A level grades. OP might want to ask any seniors from his/her school who got into top US colleges what their transcripts were like, and that might give an indication if top colleges are familiar with this situation and are willing to overlook it.
That’s an explanation, maybe. But not enough to tip a kid over the competition, all those international IB kids who understood. OP hasn’t revealed anything we can interpret as some edge. And the comment that Yale “seems like such a good school” suggests this runs deeper. That’s all. We don’t know much about him, at all.
@lookingforward I did research schools prior to applying to them. The trouble is that all the sample transcripts I saw by UK schools only had board exam grades on them, and since many colleges aren’t entirely clear on their requirements for the IGCSE/A-Level curriculum, I was mistakenly lead to believe what I did. I don’t think this represents the ‘effort I put in’ or how savvy I’m not. Please do not compare ‘all those international IB kids’ to me because over here, IB is a curriculum taught only in high-income schools that my parents could not afford to send me to, so really, they were in a much better position to be educated on this than I was.
I am aware that ‘tippy top’ schools have many applicants lined up who don’t need explanations, but I also know that I am much more than my crappy semester grades and that no one can predict who’ll get into colleges like these. The reason I’m not posting my stats or any edge I might have here is because I don’t want to get ‘chanced’, as I don’t believe any of those are ever really accurate, but be assured: the rest of my application is just as good as any other Yale applicant’s, or at the very least, it isn’t any inferior.
@aznraffe I actually did contact a few people some days after making this post. Though none of them are at an Ivy League, one of them is attending MIT and he told me not to count myself out if the other components of my app were good. Maybe that holistic approach will finally come in handy here and save me a lot of grief.
Either way, I would really like to put this topic to rest now as I got the answer I needed but the outcome will only be determined through the actual decision release in March. Speculating about it now won’t lead anywhere.
Hi, I was accepted SCEA and I’m an international student who went through IGCSEs and is now doing IB. I completely understand the whole ‘only board exams matter’ sentiment. My school sends people to the UK where the only things that count are IGCSEs/predicted grades, and they treat internal grades like they don’t matter. My teacher literally once told our class “just fail your tests and focus on your IA (internal assessments which take up 20% of our final IB grade)”. So my school does this thing where they make the tests 1000x more difficult than the actual thing to prepare us for the exams. I got straight Bs my freshman and sophomore year (still top 10% of my class), but 10A*s/As for my actual IGCSE grade. And my junior year (IB first year) I had a few 5s. I think what really made a difference was my guidance counselor’s report, where he explained this whole situation, and the strengths of the rest of my application. I also think that they compare you to the people in your class; in my case, my school sent them grade distributions so they could see what was a ‘top’ grade. TL;DR, don’t lose hope, imo they adopt a pretty holistic approach. GOOD LUCK (:
I’m from Germany and here only the last two years count for your final grade. Therefore a lot of people tend to aim for the minimum passing grade in freshman and sophomore year. Furthermore, it is possible to “delete” on or two semesters in the latter two years which wouldn’t count towards your final grade. Sometimes teachers encourage failing these semester and concentrating on the more important courses.
I started researching US universities in junior year, so I wasn’t aware of the US GPA calculations (which explains my less than stellar grades in 9th and 10th year).