Hi, by the end of my junior year I would have a 3.55-3.59 GPA overall including freshman year, but I have a 1600 SAT Score and 36 ACT and decent ECs. I am worried about applying to Brown,Dartmouth, Upenn and UC Berkeley(OS); do I have a chance/what are my chances?
The best person to ask is your school guidance counselor as they will know how you stack up against the rest of your classmates and the school’s placement history at top schools.
Keeping working hard on your grades because an upward trend is a positive for college admission.
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UC Berkeley is currently test blind so your SAT/ACT score will not be considered for admissions or scholarships, only course placement.
UC Berkeley only uses 10-11th UC a-g course grades in their GPA calculation and the UC’s calculate out 3 UC GPA’s (unweighted, capped weighted and weighted uncapped). As an OOS applicant, only AP/IB classes taken 10-11th grades are considered for the Honors points in the calculation.
Here is the UC GPA calculator: GPA Calculator for the University of California – RogerHub
The 2025 Freshman admitted UC GPA ranges overall as a follows (25th-75th percentile)
Unweighted UC GPA was 3.90-4.00
Capped weighted UC GPA was 4.15-4.29
Weighted uncapped UC GPA was 4.32-4.68
Since the UC’s do a Comprehensive application review, GPA is only one of 13 factors considered but very important since they are test blind.
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Thank you! But does the perfect SAT score in conjunction with the perfect ACT score offset the bad GPA?
FYI, Brown considers class rank and GPA as “very important”.
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Typically no, unless the college in question uses a strictly numerical formula. But it could be relevant context depending on the details of your transcript, your recommendations, and the remainder of your application.
At the end of the day, colleges are interested in what you are likely to do in their own classes. A person who tests very well on things like the SAT/ACT, but doesn’t do as well in actual classes, is not necessarily what they are hoping for in their own students.
However, there are lots of reasons someone might not have the best GPA. Some people, for example, are “late bloomers” who for whatever reason struggle with school early, but then it starts to click for them and they start doing much better. Realistically, highly selective colleges tend to have plenty of choices among kids who have high test scores and were very good at actual classes all along. But if there is enough else in an application to make them want to strongly consider a late bloomer, then they might.
In cases like that, really good teacher recommendations could help validate a late bloomer narrative. But so could really high test scores.
OK, that’s just an example, but hopefully you get the idea. Again unless the college has strictly formulaic admissions, then there is not likely going to be any sort of simple “offsetting”. But in the right circumstances, if they want to strongly consider you despite a less-than-perfect transcript, a very high test score might help verify a relevant narrative.
ETA: By the way, there are going to be very selective but not the most selective colleges that might be quite interested in taking some late bloomers with very high test scores, possibly even to the point of offering them merit. These colleges are not in a position to simply fill their classes with students who had both near perfect grades and extremely high test scores, and so they might sometimes be willing to take more chances on catching a rising star.
So thinking carefully about where your test scores might actually do you the most good, including possibly in terms of merit, would be well worth your time.
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The most selective colleges want to see top end in both (or just GPA if tests are not used) as just the starting point for possibility of admission (extracurriculars, essays, and/or recommendations can matter beyond that).
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Yep. And realistically, they don’t put as much emphasis on “perfect” test scores because they know that isn’t really a meaningful distinction.
So, the kid who has near-perfect grades in a very rigorous HS curriculm is not somehow going to get dinged for “only” having a 1570, 35, or whatever. A highly selective college will typically just see them as having satisfied all they want in those areas, and will move on to the other stuff they also want to see.
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Mostly no. The skills required to do well on the SAT test and the skills required to do very well in university classes on an ongoing day to day basis may overlap, but are not all the same.
One obvious question however is how your grades stack up on a year by year basis. As one example, UC Berkeley and at least most of the various Universities of California and CSU’s will not care about your freshman year of high school. The bad news here is that they also will not care about your excellent SAT and ACT scores.
Universities in Canada will not care about your freshman year of high school, and they will care about your SAT and ACT scores. I have consistently heard that universities in Canada will base admissions primarily on your most recent two years of high school. For many students this comes down to sophomore and junior years, but I recall at least one case from way back when I was in high school of a student with weak freshman and sophomore years of high school, but very strong junior and senior years of high school, getting accepted to McGill based on their junior and senior years. This did result in a very late acceptance to McGill, but it worked out in their case (they were able to find housing, and tell the other university that they weren’t going to show up after all).
So what is your unweighted GPA separately for each year of high school?
Generally these are reaches for all students. You might get in, but I would not count on getting in even with straight A’s throughout all of high school.
A 3.55 GPA is really not all that bad, particularly coming from a highly ranked and challenging high school. 1600 SAT is great. You will get into many very good universities with these stats. However, I do not think that any of us can say whether Ivy League schools or UC Berkeley out of state will be on the list of very good schools where you are likely to get admitted.
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No, it does not. Unless you have a convincing explanation for the gpa, but even then . . .
None of the schools you listed use standardized test scores as an important criterion for admissions decisions, so there is no reason to expect that those test scores would gain admission with a 3.6 gpa.
As an example, a member of my family had a perfect 36 ACT paired with a gpa that was pretty much straight A’s. Nonetheless, he was turned down at Harvard, Stanford, Brown, Amherst, Williams, and Pomona. These kinds of schools are outrageously difficult and unpredictable for admissions. OTOH, another family member was admitted to Harvard with a 35 ACT.
Never say “never”, but I’d be working on a Plan B.
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A family member with good scores (35/1550) and a similar gpa got one college acceptance and two deferrals that ended up being acceptances, ED’d northeastern and wasn’t even deferred. Like many, he had a late (junior year) adhd diagnosis and did much better medicated. He’s at a solid public university with an under 60% acceptance rate. It’s probably for the best.
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Not really. There are no “X will offset Y” factors. They look at everything.
As noted, Berkeley won’t even consider SAT. And for the Ivy League schools listed, based on their CDS, there are few applicants admitted with a sub-3.75 GPA. And they were likely heavily hooked.
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I moved this to Chance Me/Match Me. The following template will help others provide more detailed responses.
Guidelines
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(High school students: please get a budget from your parents and use the Net Price Calculators on the web sites of colleges of interest.)
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GPA, Rank, and Test Scores
- Unweighted HS GPA: (calculate it yourself if your high school does not calculate it)
- Weighted HS GPA: (must specify weighting system; note that weighted GPA from the high school is usually not informative, unless aligned with the recalculation used by a college of interest, such as CA, FL, SC public universities)
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Will help if your grades show an upward trajectory as you progressed through high school.
If your school has Naviance or Scoir you can check how students with your combination of gpa/test scores typically fare at the schools you mentioned. While it is no guarantee it will at least give you a sense of whether or not kids with your profile have had any success at those schools. That being said, top schools typically look for high gpa’s along with solid test scores as the minimum threshold for consideration (absent some hook) - after you’ve cleared that bar they look for other things.
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At a high school like this, you will need to speak with others at your school whether this is outlandish reach or regular reach. Your GPA is going to be very context-specific, as will your course selection, major choice, and grades in specific classes, etc. Kids at schools like this also tend to have insane ECs It will be next to impossible for us to really judge, also w/o your school profile and what it says about GPA and knowing if you have published rank (I am guessing not). One my kids also go to a very highly ranked niche school and their GPA would seem very low to people on here, but they also will be able to apply to pretty schools (still reaches, of course, but not outlandish as it would seem).
I would assume the test blind Berkeley would be hardest for several reasons…but honestly, your college/guidance counselors will be the best bet here, and if your HS is really that highly ranked I can’t imagine they are not at least decent.