Reading all comments-thank you for your thoughts.
I think the year of dance was important. As was stated above, as far as she knew, she was the only student that was doing both full time high school and full time dance, so yes, her course rigor wasn’t “up to par”, though she did take two honors classes and AP Bio (but did not take the exam) while dancing full time. I haven’t seen her transcripts, but will tonight. Apparently, there was a challenge getting the weighted honors classes that she took freshman and sophomore year onto her transcripts, but I think she said they are going to get them on, so her weighted GPA of 4.19 may go up.
Yes, she could have taken more rigor in junior and senior year. The school offers 14 APs (including Studio Art, Calc B/C, and AP Physics 1, all of which she wouldn’t take because of level/interest), and she only took two APs each year. I think she “played it safe” to protect her 4.0 u/w, and only took the AP exams that she would do well in (as attested by the 5s that she got on her two exams).
We’ll be skyping tonight and working on college list and plan of action. I used the new site, College Raptor, and plugged in her GPA and ACT as well as IR as a major. Came up with some interesting matches, safeties and reaches including Boston College, her other “dream” school.
Some schools that came up: Lafayette, Dickenson and UCSB as matches. UCD, Beloit, Kalamazoo, Lewis and Clark, and Ohio State as near safties. Boston Univ, Carlton and Haverford as reaches. Huge reaches were Yale, Brown and Stanford. (Funny they even have this category)
I cannot really speak about her low math score other than it’s simply a weakness. I would have to look deeper into the statistics of this school and its success or failure in kids taking math classes before I draw any conclusions.
I know my own son who has a math disability also took pre-calculus in his senior year fall semester. The big difference is that I had a tutor for him in every single math class he ever took (my oldest son and later, another math genius friend of ours). (They were both free!) That gave him the support he needed to end up with a 750 on SAT math and a 730 on Math II, as well as an A in Calc I in spring of senior year. This young lady did not have that kind of support. She clearly did well enough in whatever classes she had, but was it taught well? Who knows. Fact remains, I will encourage her to work on boosting the math score on the ACT. My own son raised his SAT math by 60 points just by doing practice problems.
I have very ambivalent feelings about what is better, high u/w GPA and lower test scores, or less than perfect GPA an a higher test score. My own son, 2230 SAT, but u/w 3.87 GPA and some real struggles in several areas (he got three Bs, all at the community college, during high school, but really struggled early in high school because of some disabilities), is heading to Penn after a gap year. He’s smart, but I’m not sure he’s up for the rigor.
Which kind of student is better poised for the rigors of a school such as an Ivy or other top college? (Neither??)
Anyhow, I think we’re better prepared to make a new college list with only a couple reaches on it. If she scores really well on the new ACT, we can reevaluate. I think for now, she likely won’t do EA anywhere. She’s coming late to the party for whatever reason. (As you can tell, I don’t know the family well. They came to me as a friend of a friend, and I really enjoyed working with the older daughter two years ago. She was a very average student, but equally interesting background of early homeschool followed by transition to regular high school.)
