<p>entangled – I honestly don’t know what the minimum academic threshold is. I do know that according to the Yale Common Data Set, 97% of kids who enrolled last year were in the top 10% of their high school classes. But that doesn’t really mean much, because many high schools don’t compute class rank, some weight grades and some don’t, some deflate grades and some inflate them, etc. Add to all this the fact that the rigor and quality of high schools varies so dramatically. So in a vacuum, a 95.0 GPA just doesn’t mean much. Context is everything. That’s why it’s mostly meaningless to “chance” people. Many colleges, and Yale is very likely one of them, will recalculate your GPA according to their own metric. But in assessing your record, Yale is definitely going to consider the quality and rigor of the courses you’ve taken within the context of the opportunities you’ve had. </p>
<p>Re your point about holisitic admissions, I do want to add that a very few applicants – someone with the name recognition of say, Lang Lang –- would probably get a free pass on meeting the academic threshold. For those few, music would be a genuine hook.</p>