<p>Hi, I was wondering what my chances of being admitted to Northwestern might be and how much it would hurt me not to have any Sat subjects test.</p>
<p>ACT: 35 (35 E, 31 M, 36 R, 36 S, 8 essay)
SAT: None
SAT II’s: None
W GPA: 4.37
UW GPA: ~3.9
Rank: 8/~370
AP Scores: US History (5), AP US Gov (4), AP Lang and Comp (4). Will be taking AP Comparative Gov and AP Calc AB tests later this year.
Major: Undecided, but most likely something with science. Although I hear it’s a lot easier to double major at NU than most other colleges, so I would possibly take advantage of that and double my science major with a more humanities oriented major such as classics or maybe economics.
Race: Caucasian
Gender: Male
Location: Ohio
High School: Decent public high school, nothing special.</p>
<p>Class Rigor:
Overall, I’ve taken almost as rigorous of a schedule as possible for my school.
Freshman year-all honors + two regular classes
Sophomore year-AP US History (only AP available to sophomores at my school), the rest honors, and one regular
Junior year-AP US Government, AP Lang and Comp, the rest honors
Senior year-Taking a program called STEM Bodies that is basically the most academically rigorous thing you can take at my school. It consists of 3 periods of science and one period of technical writing every day. All 4 of the periods count as separate AP classes. The meat of the program though is that we take Biology classes at Ohio State University. We go for lecture at least twice a week and then lab once a week. Other than STEM, I have AP Calculus AB and AP Comparative.</p>
<p>ECs/awards: EC’s are the weakest part of my application. They would probably be considered average-to below average, but probably more on the below average side for Northwestern applicants. I’m not going to go into much depth:
-I am a member of Key Club and NHS, and because of those, I have amassed around 70 hours of community service.
-Selected to interview for a chance to attend a prestigious government camp type thing called Buckeye Boys State. I then went through the interview process and was selected to attend this past summer.
-All the standard GPA and honor roll awards.
-Won an award from my school’s science department (they gave out probably 5-10 science awards to the whole sophomore, junior and senior class combined). I probably could have won more department awards, but they just started giving them out this year.
So yeah, as you can see, my ECs are not very impressive at all.</p>
<p>Essay: Decent-good most likely, haven’t written it yet.
Recs: Good most likely
Applying RD</p>
<p>I’m only asking for chances for Northwestern because it’s probably the only reach I might apply to.</p>
<p>Yes, by all means apply without the Subject Tests (although I wonder why you can’t take any). Your ACT is obviously excellent, so you should be okay on that front. As you correctly note, your Achilles Heel is your ECs, not test scores or transcript.
Good luck.</p>
<p>Can you not register now for the SAT IIs in November? That would be the most logical thing to do, since you seem to be a good test taker.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses 
</p>
<p>After all the money my parealrents have spent on testing for me, I don’t think they will be willing to put more towards two subject tests. Since I already have a 35 on the ACT, they are under the impression that I don’t really need to take any more tests. Honestly I don’t mind that much though because I don’t really want to have to take any more tests anyways… Would they really make that much of a difference?</p>
<p>I got in with absolutely no SAT II tests, and only a 32 ACT. Your app otherwise looks just fine, so don’t stress about it. Generally the consensus around here seems to be that good SAT IIs will help you and bad SAT IIs will hurt you, but not having them sort of just leaves your app unweighted in any way.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info Perididdle!
In order to do well on the SAT IIs, I feel like I would probably have to study a decent amount and as bad as it sounds, I just don’t feel like doing that at this point. I think I’m just going to take my chances and not bother taking them.</p>
<p>Well, since you’re sending your ACT, it wouldn’t be a bad idea just to take the SAT subject tests and if you find you did horribly on them, you can just choose not to send your scores.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice, I’m actually reconsidering taking a few subject tests. I just took 15 sample US History subject tests questions on the SAT website and got a 14/15, even though I haven’t taken US History since sophomore year, lol. Would this be any sort of indicator that I could do well on the real thing?</p>
<p>why do you call NU a reach when your ACT and rank/gpa are both above the 75 pctiles of the last freshman class?</p>
<p>I would say you have a good shot. roderick, stats are just stats, they aren’t the law. NU won’t accept everyone with good test scores, it’s not perfunctory like that. This kid seems to have OK EC’s (they are kind of unimpressive) along with the numbers to back it up.</p>
<p>Although, I don’t get how you got a 31 on the math part of the ACT, yet want to be a science major. You’re going to have to beef up your skills in math if you want to compete at NU.</p>
<p>Haha, I understand your concern about the math, but at the moment, I have an A in AP Calc AB as the quarter comes to an end if that counts for anything. Also, I’m looking more at biological sciences than more math heavy ones like engineering or chemistry (although I will obviously have to take some chem classes). I guess I should have been more specific.</p>
<p>And yes, I consider NU a reach because my EC’s are not that great at all and because it’s one of the best colleges in the world.</p>