Current chances of getting into USNA

Your athletics and leadership roles on your teams will count heavily in the plus column, and you will have taken chemistry, calculus, and physics, the three courses the academies scrutinize.

I will post a link here to my standard advice to anyone applying to Army, Navy, or Air Force (just substitute the academy of your choice in this particular post as the process is the same for each) as well as my standard response to any candidate considering attending either NASS or SLE.

To this poster, I will say that your curriculum and athletics are fine, but you need to focus your energies on being able to pass the Candidate Fitness Assessment, getting your medical record cleared by DoDMERB, and pursuing all nomination sources available to you. The nomination is the most important gate as, without one, the academy cannot offer you an appointment regardless of how stellar other parts of your application might be.

I will also highlight from my many repetitive posts here that academics are only one part of the intricate academy application process and are not evaluated the same as civilian colleges weigh them. All successful service academy appointees pass the minimum academic bar, but only a third of any incoming class is chosen for scholarship. This is not to say you shouldn’t do your academic best, but to explain (for others reading here) why there should be no surprise when applicants who were not at the top of their classes receive appointments over those with higher stats.

Every year on the service academy forum, someone will complain about “losing out” to someone with a lower academic profile, and I will reply that the service academies are war colleges whose mission is to produce capable officers for each branch of our armed services. It takes a certain kind of kid to go this route, and those kids don’t always look like the applicants to the usual civilian suspects. The SAs value a combination of brains, brawn, and leadership somewhat equally–as they must. Our son’s department head at West Point explained that the academy selects only about 1/3rd of any incoming class for academic prowess; the other 2/3rds are chosen for other equally shiny traits. All are academically capable, all pass the academic bar, but only that third is what you might label “scholarly.” The corps needs a balance of all of them in a way civilian colleges do not as they have very different missions. This is also why the academies do not shine as brightly, by average GPA and test scores, as the civilian colleges many consider their peers. So, it should come as no surprise that the racking and stacking of the academy admissions process does not align well with the civilian colleges these applicants may also be applying to, and there should be no expectation that what civilian colleges value aligns with what the U.S. military needs. So you have to let academic comparisons go. That’s not the way to think about this process. Remember, too, that USNA and USMA both have prep schools (NAPS/MAPS) to give less academically strong candidates they are interested in an opportunity to meet the standards and enter with the following year’s class.

That said, I would encourage the OP to take a look at a current USNA Class Portrait to ensure they meet or exceed the averages shown there.

Good luck!

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