I’m a student at a public school in NoVa, and applying RD to Arts & Sciences (Medieval Studies major).
Old SAT: 2140 (800 CR, 660 Math, 680 Writing)
SAT II: Literature 770, US History 710
GPA: 3.66 (weighted)
Extracurriculars: School Newspaper Columnist (9), School Newspaper Opinions Editor (10,11), School Newspaper Editor-in-Chief (12), Peer Writing Tutor (10,11,12), Young Republicans Co-Founder and Vice President (11,12), Varsity Swimming (10,11,12), Latin Club (9,10,11,12)
Honors/Awards: National Merit Commended Scholar, AP Scholar w/ Honor, National Honor Society (10-12), National Latin Honor Society (9-12), National English Honor Society (10-12)
Ethnicity: White
Gender: Male
I think my two recommendations will be good, and hopefully my essays will be excellent.
I’m looking at the Naviance data for my daughter’s NoVA school and I don’t see a single acceptance below a weighted 3.8, with about six years and 800 applicants as data points.
@bucketDad I’m at a large NOVA Highschool as well. If you don’t mind me asking on your naviance graph do you have many acceptances on the 4.0 weighted line level. I know most NOVA HS’s have the average weighted for UVA at around 4.25 My HS doesn’t have many if not any acceptances on the 4.0 line personally. However, nearly every person above around 4.2 got in curious as to others in NOVA. I would think a 4.0 weighted is within the top 10% of the class? I’m dealing with an upward trend personally
@UVAHopeful543 The distribution sounds very similar to yours. You need at least a 4.0 to have a reasonable shot at our school…and that is probably top 8-10%. Average GPA very similar for us. The scattergram suggests they really don’t care about standardized test scores. I see no examples of stellar SAT compensating for low grades.
@UVAHopeful543 We are also in one of the large Nova schools (could be the same one you or @bucketDad has a child in…but we do have acceptances right below and at the 4.0 mark. Not a huge amount, but they are there…starting at the lowest around 3.8. Our average GPA is above 4.3! Yikes. My son applied EA. My daughter applied and was accepted last year but chose her #1 choice W&M over UVa. Also, the counselors and at least at our school, the career center person has access to the whole county’s data (minus TJ, because they don’t count. LOL) on their Naviance system. It is helpful for schools where the scattergram doesn’t make sense. There are so many datapoints for UVa that it probably doesn’t matter much, but I know for one other highly selective school, the scattergram is “upside down” for our school…I asked about it, turns out it looks like they use our school mostly to recruit URMs and athletes! Good luck.
This is an odd conclusions to come to when you are looking at decisions plotted on a chart that only uses two variables.
I would love to talk to the counselor who made this conclusion because they don’t seem familiar with our review process. This isn’t unusual. There are schools I visit every year where a counselor has never bothered to come and see me. My visits are often with students, the Career Center Specialist, and a parent volunteer that’s helping out in the Career Center that day.
@DeanJ…it wasn’t UVa I was talking about! It was a much smaller, selective school, with much less data points. If you see the scattergram, it is just so weirdly different than every other school which clearly shows that many things are taken into consideration. It only looks like this for that one specific school where there are literally NO acceptances above the average SAT/GPAs (but many rejections and a few deferrals), but a few acceptances way below that average. I’d love to know how a scattergram could look like that? It may be something peculiar to our school I guess, as for the county I know it looks more like a more typical looking scattergram. And of course, it’s possible the data is actually just wrong. garbage in, garbage out I guess. Do you think these scattergrams are a bad idea?