<p>shushugah:</p>
<p>You are DRASTICALLY over-estimating the difficulty of the top colleges. Students and many misled teachers think that schools like MIT, Chicago, or Yale are truly difficult schools. They are wrong. More than 90% of students entering these schools graduate, and in the case of Yale, this figure is closer to 98%. Moreover, less than 1% of the students at each of these three top schools have a courseload that is at your courseload’s present difficulty or harder. To think that you really need this course load to succeed at the top schools is based more on naivety than anything else.</p>
<p>Think about it. Let us assume that on average, at each of the top 10 universities there are 1k students coming in each year. This is approximately correct. This means that there are 10k students coming into each of these universities every year. And moreover, at the very least, 9.5k of these 10k students graduate from the very colleges they entered within 6 years. How many people do you think have a courseload more demanding than yours nationally in your year? Do you really think it’s as many as 9500 people? Maybe 500, at the very best.</p>
<p>Also, schools nowadays are not about academics. Academics is somewhat ancillary at all but a handful of institutions (MIT, Caltech, Chicago come to mind), and even in these places, academics is not as stressed as it has been in the past. What’s more important is broadening your mental abilities (more vertically than horizontally) and making yourself into a socially active person who can additionally make connections very easily with your social skills. Your schedule doesn’t compensate for either of these aspects (and your ECs involve nothing but preparing yourself for tests). These aspects are the most important part of any application! Why else do you think schools care about your ECs?</p>