<p>Hey College Confidential!</p>
<p>This is my first post here, so sorry if I posted in the wrong forum. My question is would a college that cares equally about sports and academics rather accept a scholarly student with above average grades, or an athlete with average grades? I’ll give you guys some MOCK statistics.</p>
<p>ATHLETE:
Gender: Female
Race: Chinese
Major: Unsure, but most likely Pro Swimmer
GPA: 3.3 GPA Unweighted, 3.3 Weighted (Didn’t take AP’s because there was not enough time)
Rank: Top 30% of Class
PSAT/SAT: 150 PSAT, 1800 SAT
EC’s: AP Extra language outside of school (10 years), Karate (9 years), Piano (9 years), Violin (8 years), Swimming (9 years) (Weekend ~10 hrs, MWF ~2 hrs, TTh ~4 hrs), 300 hours volunteering over 4 years, Varsity Swimming Team since Freshman
Awards: Many, many local swimming awards, placed in sectionals and nationals, highest team in my city’s swimming team (so only few national, but many, many local), have backpack FILLED with ID cards from competitions, many meets a month
Essay: Placing first place in competition by beating the odds (talk about obstacles)
Preferred colleges: Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UC Davis</p>
<p>STUDENT:
Gender: Female
Race: Indian
Major: CS
GPA: 4.0 Unweighted, 4.8 Weighted
Rank: Top 3-5% of Class
PSAT/SAT: 230 PSAT, 2350 SAT
EC’s: Extra language (7 years, because she worked really hard over summers and studied to skip grades in order to graduate by end of high school), Tennis (Outside of school, not on school team, highest level at city tennis park, played for 5 years), Violin (8 years), French (2 years because finished all French classes and can’t join unless taking French class during that year), Math (7 years), Computer Science (4 years), Robotics (8 years), Linguistics (4 years), and Rubik’s cuber than has gone to competitions but did not win, although very fast (sub 15 seconds, sub 10 seconds if lucky) (6 years)
Awards: Johns Hopkins Talent Search - Grand Ceremony, NCWIT National, AIME (not USAMO), lots of math competitions (participation, none won), NACLO, National AP Scholar, State AP Scholar, AP Scholar with Distinction, AP Scholar with Honors, AP Scholar, Valedictorian, NMSCF, French Honors Society Grand Concours, 200 hours volunteering over 4 years, helped middle/elementary school competitions with data entry for scores, took college level computer courses
Essay: Talk about Rubik’s cubing, went from very high times to low times; if accepted into school will continue cubing at the school cubing club (UC Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech, MIT)
Preferred Colleges: Stanford, UC Berkeley, Caltech, MIT</p>
<p>I think the Athlete should go, but only if (s)he was really, really good at the sport, not average. I think the Student should go, but only if (s)he did something that really set him/her apart from other people with pretty much the same statistics.
I guess, in my opinion, the chances are 50/50 for both people.</p>
<p>So, what’s everyone else’s opinion?</p>
<p>Thanks very much for your time and opinion!</p>
<p>~twoplusthree</p>
- but I won’t say who’s who to avoid bias. We were having an argument that people with strong academics would not have a chance of getting into a good college because they “have no life, all they do is study” and that colleges only want “famous athletes, not just local glories.” I decided to post on CC to see who’s right. Also, the reason I put mock statistics is because we are both freshman, and I was browsing the forums and someone said they were a sophomore, but gave Junior and Senior grades and people were kind of scolding her to not guess what’s going to happen, so to avoid that I wrote these were mock statistics, but it didn’t work.</p>