How do you determine a reach/match/safety school?

Venkat89
Wed, 22 Aug 2007 03:11:54 +0000

crapshoot as in we have more kids admitted to Harvard than Brown, Princeton than Brown, Caltech than Brown, etc. It wasn’t very high on my list of reaches so I figured why apply to such a selective school if it’s not in my top 5 choices.

But yea, the best thing to do is to talk to your college counselor or GC and try to see how past applicants around your SAT and GPA did from your school. It’s better than doing a chances thread on CC IMO. From what I remember at my school’s Naviance website, it would show the median SAT and GPA for people accepted to each school. For big state schools, almost everyone with both numbers over the medians were accepted (save Berkeley, UCLA, and a few others). My school wasn’t so helpful though for smaller LACs because most kids end up applying to the same top 20 schools, Big 10, ACC, or SEC schools.