<p>All the schools that offer merit-aid scholarships require high scores and GPA. You can’t have one and not the other to qualify. For example, Chapman U. is one that gives out very good merit-aid, but you’ll need both. Now, unless you’re not looking for merit-aid, there will be schools that may consider one over the other to fulfill their stats criteria.</p>
<p>Dartmouth loves high test scores, as do Yale, and UPenn.</p>
<p>With “top” schools, you typically need all of high school grades, rigorous high school course selection (relative to what was available to you), and test scores to be near “maximum” possible to have a non-trivial chance of acceptance. Such schools then typically have a pool of such applicants much larger than their freshman classes, so they use other holistic criteria, which can seem like a lottery to the applicants. The most selective may take fewer than one out of ten applicants.</p>
<p>In other words, high SAT or ACT scores are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to gaining admission to “top” schools.</p>
<p>I understand, and I would say I’m a pretty well rounded applicant. My first choice is Barnard, which does not care about scores, unfortunately. So if I don’t get Barnard ED, I’m looking for other top (but not HYPS-top) schools that will appreciate a high score.</p>
<p>At my school, for example, Carnegie Mellon and BC have this reputation.</p>
<p>Oh, and I don’t need aid.</p>
<p>Look for schools that offer National Merit scholarships, as they clearly value high test scores. Also, look at the Common Data Set for the schools that you are interested in, and they indicate how important standardized test scores are.</p>
<p>Ivies double weight SAT/ACT scores vs GPAs when calculating the Academic Index (AI) used in admission decisions. Of course most applicants to those schools are already in the top 5% or so in test scores anyway.</p>