I’m an Indian citizen applying next year to Yale. I have represented our country in the international geography Olympiad and the international Deutsch Olympiad in 2017 and 2016. However my school academics for 11th grade are average. I was wondering if my liberal artsy Olympiads would help me in admissions at Yale and would they possibility negate my poor 11th grade marks as well
No.
For any college, especially for an Ivy league, unless you are a recruited athlete, poor grades will not get you in. Even for recruited althetes who are top ranked nationally, they will still have a very hard time if their grades or standardized test scores are subpar.
My ap scores are 5,5,5,4,4 and 800 in chem sat 2 and 770 in physics and 800 in math
I will be taking my act in sept and will be hoping for 34+
ECs do not make up for below average academics.
@rama2022 - your extracurricular accomplishments and your Subject test scores are impressive. I wouldn’t worry too much if your GPA is “average” for one year in a highly competitive high school. And if you can demonstrate an upward trend - better grades - in your senior year, that will help a lot. But without knowing what you plan to study, your GPA, ACT scores, etc., it is difficult to encourage or discourage you from pursuing admission to Yale. Best of luck!
It depends on what your 11th grade grades are.
Is an “average” GPA a 3.7 or 93/100? Grades like those are nothing to worry about.
However, if by “average” you mean a 3.0 or 85/100 GPA- then no, your ECs will not make up for it.
Yale used to have the below phrase on their website; I’m sure it’s still applicable
[quote]
While there is no hard and fast rule, it is safe to say that performance in school is more important than testing. A very strong performance in a demanding college preparatory program may compensate for modest standardized test scores, but it is unlikely that high standardized test scores will persuade the admissions committee to disregard an undistinguished secondary-school record.
I will be applying for German as I very impressive German extracurricular, like the most prestigious German scholarship, international Deutsch Olympiad, president German club, editor of a highly selective magazine in the world etc. Moreover I have topped German every year starting from 6th grade I currently have a 98% in German
Will they see that my German academics are good and that’s the major I plan on doing
My cgpa in 9th and 10th is 9.8/10 (Indian system), which means all A+'s and 1 A.
In addition to describing the importance of a distinguished HS record upthread, gibby elsewhere points out that international students do not have it easy:
[QUOTE=gibby]
FWIW: International applicants do NOT have the same odds as US applicants. Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and MIT (among other colleges) limit the number of international students to about 10% to 11% of an incoming freshman class – and most of those international students are from just 6 countries: Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, China, Korean and Japan.
Yale is not as forthcoming as Harvard, but go to http://www.hio.harvard.edu/statistics. From the pull-down menus, select STUDENTS, HARVARD COLLEGE (the undergraduate school) and YOUR COUNTRY, and you’ll see how few of your fellow countrymen are enrolled at Harvard. Be sure to divide that number by 4 to get an idea of how few students are admitted each year from your country. My best guess is that Yale’s numbers are about the same for your country. Without even knowing where you are from, I’m going to take a guess that the odds are not good (sorry)! That’s just the reality when international students apply to US colleges. I wish I could be more optimistic.
[quote]
^^^ If you go to the above site in post #12, you’ll see that there are only 22 international students from India at Harvard who are freshman, sophomores, juniors and seniors. That means Harvard, on average, accepts about 6 students a year from India.
As Yale enrolls a smaller freshman class than Harvard, Yale probably accepts, on average, FEWER International students from India. By all means apply to Yale, but do so with your eyes wide open and understand your odds are not great – that’s true no matter what your GPA, test scores, or EC’s.
Another school to check out with much BETTER odds is The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/07/u-illinois-growth-number-chinese-students-has-been-dramatic
Why do you want to major in German at Yale? Do you want to be a diplomat someday? Or is you interest in German primarily academic? Is your German good enough to read German writers - phiolosphers, poets, novelists - in German? What were your grades in 11th grade? As @Gibby mentioned above, consistently strong grades are really important to admissions officers. And, if your standardized test scores are also very strong, as the ones you’ve posted are, then that reinforces your argument that you are academically prepared for a rigorous college curriculum. That said, as@IxnayBob shows, the odds of admission are low for international students, as they are for extremely well-qualified Americans. Your challenge is to create a narrative through your essays and supplemental answers that coherently and persuasively show that you love what you study in school; have pursued that interest seriously, rigorously outside of school; and have done so over a long period of time for the sheer pleasure of doing so - well before the calculus of college admissions became your preoccupation. My advice: Start writing those essays now and re-write, edit and re-write them till they are small, yet beautiful, gems of personal expression and literary exposition. Best of luck to you!
Yes I want to major in german, my school marks for 9th and 10th as i mentioned are good enough with topper in german. My 11th grade marks are average for other subjects except for german which i have topped again. Im feeling confident that I should be able to secure good marks in 12th and top again in german. My question is- will i look academically weak to yale admissions officers? I self studied all my AP’s since my school in india only offers the india board. I self studied Calc BC-5,Chemistry-4,Microeconomics-5,Macroeconomics-4,Human Geography 5 and Environmental science. Will my self studied aps bolster my academic profile
You have received very good advice on this thread already but are not answering the question about your 11th grade GPA which everyone has told you is super important - more important than AP scores in the US admissions process than standardized test scores, unless the student comes from a high school with known grade inflation, in which case the standardized test scores will either reinforce or refute the student’s high GPA. If you care more about test scores than about the holistic criteria used to evaluate American college applicants, why not apply to Cambridge, Oxford, or other British Unis where your GPA won’t matter as much?
my gpa will be a 3.7 converted into us system. my class rank for 11th would be 8
^^^ @worriestoomuch is right on point that you have gotten a lot of good objective advice on the difficulty of getting into any highly selective university in the US, focusing on Yale for the moment. Even if your grades and test scores were perfect, and you had a nice list of EC’s/accomplishments, anyone who knows how competitive the process is these days for these schools will still tell you that these schools will still be a major reach. With an “average” junior year, just realize that you will be up against students, particularly those from India, that have a perfect high school record. That having been said, there is no reason not to apply, but what we are all saying is you have to temper your expectations.
I will comment that saying you want to major in German is kind of odd. If you are so passionate about German, if I were in the shoes of an AO, I would ask why is this student from India wanting to come to the US to study German when there are so many great universities in Germany? I would be very careful of trying to manipulate the “major” desired to increase your perceived chances. Chances are your school record, your essays, LoR’s and EC’s won’t match up. I am not saying this is the case for you, but the most negative write-ups I have written as an interviewer were for students who chose some offbeat major, and during the process of the interview came off as having very superficial knowledge and/or interest in the subject. From what you have written, you do seem to have legit ties to German, but then I go back to my first point in this para.
Bottom line, when it comes to admissions into the top/ elite schools there is really no logic in getting in, some may get admitted to Harvard but rejected by Hopkins. Majority of the admitted students have stellar grades and test scores, and majority of those students have some kind of outstanding “hook”, whether it is EC or legacy or athlete, etc. Going back and forth on this board of what your chances are will never end until you ultimately get a notice from Yale. Seems from your stat’s you have a chance, but not a great one. And based on an extremely low admissions rate of these elite schools, since honestly you will not be unique in your achievements, your average GPA certainly will not help in getting accepted.