<p>I definitely agree with all the other posters about Stanford not caring that much about grades.</p>
<p>At my school, there were like 25 kids (out of 300) who applied REA, including the kids with the top 5 GPAs. They ALL got rejected. Why? Well for one, all of them did the same, typical extracurricular with no national-level accomplishments. Only like two had state-level accomplishments. They didn’t do much else. Furthermore, they were your typical “grinds;” they didn’t have much of a social life and took tests and regurgitated material.</p>
<p>There were 4 kids who got accepted. Everybody (including average students who pedestalized the kids with the highest GPAs) was VERY surprised when the results came out. While the max GPA in our class was like a 4.7, with a ton of people above a 4.5, these three had a 4.4, 4.4, and 4.5, with tons of Bs and even one C. But what else did they do? One started his own pool cleaning business in 7th grade and grew it into a large operation that’s well known throughout our town. Another spent the last two summers teaching math to socioeconomically disadvantaged 3rd graders for SIXTY hours a week for seven weeks and then got involved in education policy reform. Another was very involved in tap dancing as a male. He also defended our school in the local newspaper (without any prior prodding) after some bonehead reporter tried to expose a nonexistent “scandal” at our school. The latter two were guys you’d genuinely want to have a beer with, and I guess that came out in the recs. The last one… was black. I personally think half these kids wouldn’t have a chance at HYP given their class ranks, but what do I know. Similar things have happened previous years.</p>
<p>tl;dr Stanford cares far more about your personality/what you do outside of the classroom than about your grades/scores.</p>