- Colleges care immensely about the trajectory of his grades across his HS career. Junior year is especially important. Far better to have a 3.4 GPA for Freshman-Sophomore years and a 4.0 GPA for Junior year than vice-versa.
- Despite #1, assuming your student is "unhooked" i.e. is not either
- an under-represented minority,
- a legacy
- a recruited athlete or possessor of some other special talent which puts him in the top 1/10th of 1% of talented (musicians)(writers)(young scientists)(performing artists)(student leaders/activists) nationwide...
… then your son has next to no chance of being admitted to a top 20 university. Unfortunately, they care far more about grades and class rank than they do standardized test scores.
Yes, I know the above sounds upside-down or even perverse. But one of the goals for adcoms at elite universities today is to “level the playing field” by giving underprivileged kids and minorities a leg up on middle- and upper-middle class kids with far higher SAT / ACT scores.
So you will see that UC San Diego, for instance, lists among its top 20 contributing high schools - i.e. schools that send >20 students to UCSD each year - both:
- Silicon Valley standout high schools where the average SAT score for a UCSD student from that school is 1450 or higher
and
- schools in low income neighborhoods where the average SAT score for a UCSD student is <1100. The top "feeder" school with the lowest score was a San Diego "magnet" school whose average SAT score for the students it sent to UCSD was - get this - 894.
Yes, 894!
And the above school cohorts, those with 99th percentile SATs and those where kids are scoring around or even substantially below 1000, have exactly the same GPA’s!
The adcoms are engaged in social engineering: imposing a de facto CAP on the # of students admitted from the super high-achieving high schools, and a de facto FLOOR beneath the # of students admitted from the vastly underperforming high schools.
There is nothing whatsoever you can do to affect this practice.
If your child applies to Top 20-25 or other elite schools with a large number of B’s and C’s, and without one of the “hooks” described above, he or she will not be admitted.
You’re best off applying to a broad set of public flagship schools in the Midwest and the Southwest and seeking to get into their Honors programs.
Many of these will gladly take your child and provide generous merit aid based on his test scores.
Good luck!