Chance a delusional student [US citizen outside the US, <$40k, BArch]

Re-opening OP’s original thread and merging the duplicate thread, since it appears they would like more feedback.

Is this what US colleges use to assess Hong Kong-educated students for entry?

Replying to myself, not always so easy to find requirements by country. NYU gives these - they accept the HKDSE but also require 3 years of transcripts, so it’s not just about the final score. I imagine other schools would have similar sorts of requirements.

“Top 5%” is very good. It is not likely to be good enough for Princeton, Cornell, Yale, MIT, Columbia, or Caltech. When I was a student at MIT, I knew one student who had only been 7th in his high school, out of about 500 students. Thus he was not quite in the top 1% of his high school. However, he graduated from a very rigorous, very famous high school that was very well known for extreme rigor in math and sciences. If he had been at a normal high school, he would have been in the top 1%. As far as I can remember the rest of the freshman class arriving at MIT had in most cases been in the top 1% of their high school either overall, or for math and sciences. Admissions has gotten more difficult in the many years since I was there. Caltech would be similar. In a similar sense, 770 is very good on the math part of the SAT exam, but it is low for MIT and Caltech.

UCLA and UC Berkeley, assuming that you are considered out of state, will not be affordable. My guess is that the same is probably true of Michigan.

If there is one single student in all of Hong Kong who can get 4’s in math and sciences, that is the one kid who has a decent chance of getting accepted to MIT or Caltech. The kid who found that the math part of the SAT is basically too easy and there was not a single question that was remotely challenging, is again the student who might get accepted to MIT or Caltech.

I would trim the list to three or four schools. I do not think that it is worth applying to such a long list of schools which are so unlikely to happen.

1 Like

Is it me or did the OP post their stuff and then never reply - only to come back and post the same stuff again 7 months later?

3 Likes

Look like there was one reply in the original thread which copy/pasted the first post with some additional info added in.

I think this thread is the original that dates to September of last year. Then OP started a new thread yesterday with the same information and adin’s merged it into this original thread. Maybe I’m misinterpreting.

Yes, but the 9th or 10th post back in Sept 2025 was the one I referred to above. That seems to be the last one till the new ones?