My son got a 35 on the ACT and a 1530 on the SAT, but his grades aren’t quite as high, comparatively. He attends an extremely competitive public school in NJ and is ranked, I’d guess, in the top quarter of the class. (Maybe a 4.05 or 4.1 weighted GPA overall.) He doubled up on AP Bio and AP Physics this year and is running B/B+ in both, which has kept his GPA less than stellar. Nevertheless, his grades show a pronounced upward trend from freshman year.
Given that his grades are good but not outstanding, what schools put heavy emphasis on good test scores? Another poster said Vanderbilt does, but he wasn’t considering Vandy (not sure why). He’s looking for roughly midsize research universities in the East so he can focus on science, and cost is not a factor. He’s got great ECs, too, including working on the local rescue squad and being president of several clubs. So far his top choices include Brandeis, Emory, Cornell, and Rochester. Thanks!
More reachy than Brandeis, but similar in size and feel would be Tufts. Their admissions is pretty unpredictable. My kid was a B+/A- student at a big NY public school ad had 790CR/690M. He really worked at coming up with essays that were a little quirky and intersting to read with some humor and was accepted there. I think many universities when pressed will say that SAT scores matter more than they like to admit, but less than applicants think. The problem is colleges don’t want slacker kids who don’t know how to work when they need to - and the high score. low(ish) grades tend to read that way.
High test scores are valuable at every school that would be on the radar of top students. Grades count because they indicate study habits- a top student who doesn’t know how to study/get the work done ids a setup for failure in college. My gifted son had equal/better test scores than your son but also did not have the perfect grades (his HS did not use+/- nor did they weight grades). He was bored.
From Wisconsin where the UW admissions reps consistently stated course rigor and grades were important. I can see this as knowing how to study is needed in good colleges- no sliding by. Improved grades do make a difference.
Ignore your quest for high test score colleges and instead look at schools that will fit your son’s academic needs (and your financial ones). Some schools will not take him because they have plenty of students with overall better stats but many will consider his improvement plus stellar test scores as indicators that he belongs and can handle the work. The same gpa with consistent grades is not as good as a slow start and better junior year grades in more rigorous classes.
A lot of students from NJ attend UW. Stellar school in many fields. Excellent Honors Program. Consider your son’s potential major. Some of the top tier public flagships have much better offerings than highly ranked LACs. Wash U, for example lags far behind UW in math, chemistry etc- grad school rankings but Honors students benefit from that and may even take some of those grad courses as an undergrad. As a chemistry major eons ago I looked at the general chemistry offerings- some schools only had one! One size does not fit all.
S18 is in similar boat - 35 Act and strong SAT IIs but a 3.5 GPA in rigorous classes and good but fairly generic ECs. Goes to small, highly selective, very competitive private school so top 10% of class is out of the question. Has a good trend-line, though (each year’s grades better than the last). Thinking of similar schools to those named above. Also Pitt, Richmond, Wake Forest and Tulane.
Leaving this past admissions cycle, I was someone who had a 3.5 UW and a 32 and of the schools mentioned that I applied to, I got into Richmond and Northeastern (with a merit scholarship) but WL at GW. Just adding some extra data, hope it helps! I was also in the IB diploma program.
I know he is not interested, but Vanderbilt seems logical, actually. They also really put an emphasis on “leadership” which your son seems to have. It is not huge – about 6000 undergrads. They are strong in science and the med school is right there together with the main campus. (I would pick Vandy over Brandeis, based on experience of having a child attend Vandy and having worked at Brandeis. I hope I am not offending anyone – it’s an issue of infrastructure in part. Brandeis is a bit run down compared with Vanderbilt.)
P.S. your son’s grades/scores are similar to my son’s, at a similar-type public school, and in a similar type rank, but your son’s ECs are probably better. Son was waitlisted at Vanderbilt, admitted to BU, rejected at Northwestern 5 years ago.
I know two 35 ACT students with what would be considered good grades 4.3-4.4 weighted putting them in the top 10 percent of our HS Class who were both denied at Emory because ( when counselor probed) " grades were too low given the ACT score! At the same time similar grade students with 32 were admitted. Both the Emory denials admitted to Vandy.
Do you know why there is a disconnect between grades and scores (if there is one)? Is there any learning issue, testing anxiety, ADHD, anything that should be looked at? Does he work hard for his grades?
Find out why your kid does not care for Vanderbilt and have him reconsider. My 35ACT, 760/760 SAT child received a a nice merit scholarship. It is a great school with great rankings, including tops for “happiest students” by Princeton Review. Good test scores with excellent leadership goes a long way here.
Sometimes, one’s HS GPA could also indicate a given high school is unusually rigorous academically(My public magnet HS) or conversely the given high school’s academic rigor is on the extreme low end.
For instance, if one used the above as the metric, then by rights, I should have flunked out of my private LAC as my HS GPA placed me somewhere in the bottom quarter of my HS graduating class whereas my older undergrad classmate who graduated ~the top 15% of his respectable/elite private boarding school class and accepted to a couple of Ivies…albeit one as a legacy should have graduated with flying colors.
In actuality, the older classmate ended up taking nearly 8 years to graduate because he crashed and burned so badly academically that he was placed on academic suspension for one year and his parents forced him into taking an involuntary gap year when his grades were still abysmal…though not failing. If he had done as well as the above statement as a metric and he graduated with a reasonably good GPA, we would have never overlapped.
I also ended up tutoring him for the classes we took together despite the fact I was taking them for the first time and he was repeating them.
There were times back then I wondered in my head in exasperation “How in the world did he manage to graduate HS with the GPA/class rank he did and get admitted only to do so badly and struggle* with readings/assignments I felt were manageable/no big deal?!!”
He put in nearly double the study time I did and struggled academically with abysmal grades while taking a much lower courseload(9-12 credits/semester vs 15-16/semester) and not working a ~20 hour/week part-time job that I was working.
Maybe he had depression or some other mental/emotional problem. Maybe he had physical ailments he struggled with or family problems or any number of personal problems that interfered in his life. Maybe he had struggles he never would have admitted to you or anyone else. There are any number of explanations that you would not have been privy to.
@compmom Do you think a B+ in an AP science class in a competitive school is actually a “disconnect” with a high ACT score and a possible red flag for an attention deficit disorder? To me it sounds totally normal given the workload in high school plus outside activities. But maybe that is my normal and not normal after all.
@LBowie, you hit the nail on the head. Between those two AP science courses, AP Gov, two honors courses and one “regular” course (six courses in all–he took AP Bio as an elective and is with mostly seniors), he works as hard as he can.
We live in a part of NJ that is full of big pharma companies and parents with PhDs–and many of their kids are naturally incredibly bright as well as the kinds of kids who take STEM courses every summer.
I believe if he went to most other high schools here in NJ, he would be much closer to the top of the class. As he put it, “I could work harder, but I’d sleep even less and have even less of a life.” No Ivy degree is worth that kind of burnout.
Oh of course a B+ is a fine grade. I was responding to the first few sentence in the original post and what seemed to be the parent’s concern about some kind of problem- and somehow glossed over the actual grades. The point seemed to be that the scores and grades don’t match- but they do, right?
Since the parent mentioned Ivy burnout, I don’t think Ivies care that much about whether you get a 33 or a 35, or a 720 or an 800. I think the focus on either grades or scores is misguided, period. And where did the Ivy reference come from? Was there an Ivy on the list?
I guess I don’t understand the post at all. What exactly is the problem??? Super duper scores and only excellent grades?