| Auburn I have also posted on the Auburn Forum and received essentially no response so I decided to try to answer some of your concerns. While I have found some very useful information on this board there is a rather precipitous decline in interest once you move beyond the well known tier 1 schools (rated by USNWR).
Don’t be buffaloed by what you may see on this site. It looks to me like you are on the right track with your classes. You can look at the Auburn.edu website where they have a page listing the types of classes and requirements.
My son was accepted to Auburn and will be attending in the fall so we do have some experience with the school and the admission process. You have probably noted that everyone posts "stats" on this post to rate each other and establish an order of dominance. So for comparison my son's stats are SAT 1250/1850, ACT 28 (his psat and early sat test scores were lower but can’t remember exactly how much – BTW the Kaplan prep didn’t help very much). He attends a very large and competitive suburban high school near Houston with >1000 in his graduating class - ranked about 350 with a 3.2 GPA. Took 2-3 AP classes each year. Was in marching band, President of German Club, did some community service work through the Church. So while his test scores were good they are not spectacular nor are the grades and extra curricular activities.
He applied to, and was accepted (engineering) at Syracuse, Miami University, Clemson, Auburn, Virginia Tech and Baylor, all of which are solid tier 2 schools (by the every quoted USNWR ranking ~50 to 85 on the list). He also received varying amounts of scholarship money from a couple of these schools. Auburn has rolling admission and he was accepted almost immediately. The admission process for Auburn was very easy. There is an internet application with a small box for a brief (200-300 words) “essay”. In fact it may be optional. No letters, extensive essays and so forth. Syracuse and Miami required much more effort (essays, letters etc).
Frankly, I was rather surprised at our experience with whole this process. I read many articles suggesting that because the admissions process was so competitive anything less than near perfect grades, class rank and test scores plus several summers of doing cancer research, solving world hunger or a term in Congress would doom you to attending the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople or something. While I don’t doubt there is extreme competition for the best tier 1 schools, this doesn’t appear to be the case for most of the rest. Some of the schools ranked in with tier 1 are large state schools or specialized or in weird locations or have no co-eds (like RPI for example) that are not that selective. Look at the admissions stats on Princeton Review and you will find that all of the schools I listed above accept at least 55% of the applicant and some places like Auburn and VT its probably closer to 75-80%. The average SAT for Auburn admission is probably less than 1100. So I think you will find that if you apply you stand a good chance of being accepted.
Those factors (like perfect grades and SAT) do impact scholarships. Look at the Auburn.edu web page for scholarships to see what they are looking for. 1250 (old) SAT is kind of a minimum for the academic scholarships if I remember right and you will really need better to actually get anything. |