Guaranteed Admission In Caltech?

mathboy98
Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:43:51 +0000

what if you have a near 4.0 unweighted GPA, very high SAT score (2350+), and 5’s on AP Chem & Physics C Mechanics or E & M, 800s on SAT II Math2 and Chem. but you haven’t taken the AMC or AIME and have no extracurriculars related to engineering, math, or science? would that person still have a chance at CalTech with speech & debate as his/her extracurricular?





^Why would you want to go to Caltech where you must BREATHE science and engineering just to survive if you don’t do it now?

I don’t want to be mean but this is an important question.



HitMan, you’re right that it is an important question, but consider the facts - admissions don’t always work that way.

I certainly have examples of a student A type who puts special effort into acing more classes, retaking standardized tests to get the highest possible scores, with no significant math/science extracurriculars, but lots of others, and seemingly the type to market the self to the school well, and getting accepted over the student B type (one of my friends) who had good stats (almost all A’s, but didn’t care about getting some B’s in non math/sci classes), 2300+ SAT, high SAT IIs, APs in frosh year, and didn’t make it, despite breathing science/engineering, but informally and not taking the time to package these things into something nice-sounding in an application like “published in so and so journal” while he was very capable of doing so. Interestingly, an example of student A turned down Caltech for any Ivy, and an example of student B turned down a very good Ivy for another school.

Sometimes this leads me back to silverturtle’s point posted in several places that working hard to have the best possible padding to the application (even when it comes to trying to ace the SAT) may at least correlate with admission strongly, when most of us would agree that padding is padding, and doesn’t really distinguish future potential in the field as much.

However, maybe I cannot conclude anything at all valid from these anecdotal points - but they do bring up questions.

Not to say any of this is bad - in the end, Caltech admits very exceptional students with tons of passion for math/science, but just saying, there are these data points out there. All in all, I don’t know of a school with an admissions process I esteem more.