Weighted GPA should generally be ignored, unless it is calculated specifically to match a targeted college’s recalculation (e.g. CA and FL publics). A high school’s weighted GPA may only be useful for class rank purposes or for interpreting a college admissions scatterplot using that weighted GPA.
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I think of “high stats” as being a 3.9+ UW gpa and in the top 1% of test takers (for the SAT that would be a 1530+/ACT is 35+). Obviously, that would be in tandem with taking the most rigorous schedule available at your school.
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According to the College Board website, a 34 on the ACT is 99th percentile.
I think it’s 3.9+ – with a rigorous course load – and 1500+ on the SAT or 34+ on the ACT.
Such stats, to me, should be competitive everywhere.
ETA – if a high school practices relative grade deflation, then AOs may go by class standing/rank… in which case, I would think you’d want to be in the top 5% of the class for serious consideration to the most rejective schools. So a kid who graduates 3rd in a class of 250, with a 3.79 GPA and 34/1500, could also be academically competitive.
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Got it. I was trying to make them equivalent - a 34 on the ACT is a 1490-1520 and a 35 is a 1530-1560.
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When I see 4.0, I assume straight A’s, since weighted GPA’s are so different anywhere. I think the highest wgpa at our GS is a 4.4, and honors is weighted the same as AP.
That’s what I think. S24 has a 3.98 - he’s gotten one A- in HS.
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Then to this fact, it may be 1530 and not 1550 that is the SAT score that warrants this recurring, self assigned label of “high stats?”
I’m not sure who is self-assigning. I’ll admit I think that S24 has an extremely strong academic profile (3.98 UW/1580 SAT) - I base that on the fact that only about 3,000 students score a 1580 or better- but I don’t generally go around referring to him as “high stats”. I actually thought he was just in the “average excellent” category until someone here corrected me on that.
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Based on our SCOIR data, 1500ish/34 test scores may not be competitive for our unhooked kids at a handful of colleges.
The data is pretty sparse, and I don’t actually have Yale data. But for HPSM, there are nothing but rejections and two waitlists with unknown outcomes in the 1500ish/34 range. Nor any acceptances in that range to Columbia or Rice (interesting), although those add two more waitlistings: outcome unknown. There are some Princeton and Rice admits significantly below that range, but my guess is they were hooked.
Then there are at least a few acceptances at the 1500ish/34 range at Penn, Duke, Brown, Hopkins, and Northwestern. Not as high as a hit rate, though, as in the 1540ish/35+ range.
With Chicago, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Vanderbilt, the hit rate gets much better in the 1500ish/34 range, and now there are some acceptances in the 1460ish/33 range too (but again a much lower hit rate).
WUSTL (known to like our kids) admitted most of the high GPA kids in the 1460ish/33 range, and some in the 1430ish/32 range.
Notre Dame (even more known to like our kids) and Georgetown seem to go down solidly to 1400ish with a high GPA. CMU, known to like our high GPA STEM kids, is similarly solid down at least that far for high GPA kids, maybe even a touch lower (although we do send hooked kids to CMU).
Emory is hard to say–there are some admits in that 1400ish range and a bit below, but most are in the 1460/33+ range, and so some of the lower ones might be hooked.
Anyway, I am laying all this out because at a high level, there is a more or less expected scale (except for Rice–why are you so stingy, Rice?) for where our high GPA kids have the best chances at different test score levels, give or take a bit for schools known to like our kids.
And for the top few most selective colleges, a 1500ish/34 might not do it (at least unhooked), and might be only marginal at a few more.
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Bit of a random aside, and this is slicing my data loaf rather thin, but my conclusion after looking at way too much SCOIR data is a 35 might be seen more on the high side of that range for this particular purpose, meaning I see high GPA people with 35s apparently getting in at the same rates as people with a 1550/1560 SAT. You can actually see a similar effect in some CDS reports, where sometimes, not always, the reported range for enrolled ACTs is not quite as high as the official median concordance with the SAT.
Just a little quirk in the greater scheme, but I do wonder if the ACT might sometimes be a mildly preferable choice for some kids for this reason.
So I am one of those people here who think that is in fact “better” than just “average” excellence.
Part of it is just that for reasons I just documented, I do think a high 1500s SAT is potentially more helpful than a low 1500s SAT at a handful of colleges.
The GPA is more of a neutral thing, but I again think there can be many cases where a truly high rigor transcript with one A- will actually read better than all As from a secondary school where maybe colleges are not so sure of the real rigor.
That definitely could be the case. More kids get a 35+ (13,700) than a 1550+ (8,300). I think there is also a geographic component. The ACT is still much less common here in MA than the SAT; and there are fewer places that offer it - that probably has more to do with what test kids take than anything else.
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Yes, when some of us discussed this earlier, it was noted as a possibility that perhaps these Coastal maximally-selective colleges are just engaging in a little generosity toward Interior applicants to balance out their geographic distribution a bit, which could lead to a little more observed generosity with the ACT simply due to correlation and not causation with where the ACT is more common.
And I definitely would not rule that out.
It’s definitely hard to say. I think the New England/Mid-Atlantic elites (and probably those on the West Coast as well) like to see geographic diversity and all things equal, a very strong candidate from the Midwest might be a little more appealing than another kid from MA (most elite schools have no shortage of those).
At the minimum, I think we are getting into why “high stats” is almost always going to be contextual from the colleges’ perspectives. They just have so many other goals besides “get the kids with the best numbers,” but that doesn’t mean they are never thinking in terms of, “get the kids who fit this profile who then have the best numbers for such kids.”
So if it is so inherently contextual on their side, I am hesitant to ignore context from our side of things either.
Exactly. “High stats” (however you want to define them) are not enough at highly competitive schools - it is merely the price of entry. And, of course, what is “high” is very contextual. I think it is easy to get caught up in stats because it is quantifiable, measurable and identifiable. The rest of the factors that go into the admissions stew are unknown to us as outsiders. That is why I always wonder why folks want the stats for admitted kids (although I’ll provide if asked - should S24 be admitted) because, often, the stats of rejected students are very similar to those of students who were rejected. It doesn’t really tell you anything.
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Yes, exactly. At the highly rejective schools, these “very high stats” are the norm, and merely the starting point for further consideration.
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What would be more helpful for holistic admission schools is if there were bands or grids of admission rates, like what the AAMC shows for medical school admissions: https://www.aamc.org/media/6091/download
Even then, it shows that there are factors beyond high stats that matter (e.g. 82.9% of medical school applicants in the highest stat box with 3.8+ college GPA and 518+ MCAT were admitted – meaning that 17.1% were not).
Of course, for schools that admit by formula (mainly moderately selective schools), they could be more transparent by posting the formula and the thresholds for admission.
Yes, it would be very helpful in terms of calibrating people’s expectations. It’s never going to happen, though, because if super high stats kids see that their chances are only, say, 20% (and I’m making that up, obviously) it might make more of them hesitate to apply. My personal opinion is that very high stats students often have an inflated sense of their chances - maybe if they saw their chances are much lower than they imagine they’d think twice about applying (I could be wrong, though, as hope springs eternal).
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