Admissions into Ivy League Universities?

Question

I'm a SE Asian student looking to apply to a university in the US. I am currently a student in an international school taking the IB Diploma and 2 additional AP courses. I have a GPA of 4.3 (the additional .3 comes from IB HL courses and AP courses) and a SAT score of 1920 (with 800 on math). I participate in some extra-curricular activities, most of which are clubs. Do I have a high chance of getting into a top university in the US?

Answer 1

The good news: Your grades and an 800 in math on the SATs are impressive and some very good schools in the US will want you.

The bad news -- if you have a 1920 on the SATs, then you took the three part SAT exam and averaged 560 on the other two parts. That won't cut it at the very top schools. The average student accepted at Ivy League schools, Duke, Stanford, Chicago, Northwestern, MIT and Cal Tech has you beat by 200 to 300 points. Many might think that these schools may discount your verbal scores since you are a foreign student. But the fact is that the top schools get lots of applications from Asian students with nearly perfect SAT scores and can't take all of them.

I think that you will get into a very good school. I think that it is a stretch to get into the schools at the very top -- but it is not impossible. Your chances will be improved if you indicate that you want to study mathematics or a science. They will also improve if you are able to take the SAT again and bring up your verbal scores.

Answer 2

A 1920 on the SAT is above average, but not impressive enough. With an 800 on the math side, you can certainly score better on the Reading and the Writing portions of the SAT once you learn all the rules of the game. Alternatively, check out the ACT - it's accepted by the schools you aim for, and many students who are great in math find the ACT easier.

Most importantly, make sure to learn how the tests work and how to work with it, rather than struggle against it. Do you research, get some help, do some studies, and retake the test to help you not only get into those schools, but also get prestigeous scholarships.
good luck!

Answer 3

No, you don't. Playing a sport can help (if you are varsity-level), just like playing an instrument can help. But so can doing community service, or student government, etc. The important thing is to just do activities that you are commited to and passionate about. And of course, your high school GPA and courses, as well as SAT scores, are still the most important single factors involved. The one thing that is special about sports is that colleges really want to get good athletes for their college teams, so that the school teams can win. At the Ivies, this means that the colleges are willing to relax their normal academic standards (sometimes by a lot) in order to let in really talented athletes. But once the college has enough athletes to fill their football, basketball, lacrosse, etc. teams, that's the end of it--no special preference for the rest of the athletes. And the Ivy League actually has a league-wide quota on the number of applicants each Ivy college is allowed to relax its academic standards to admit. The exact quota is not published (it's confidential), but the Ivy League publishes the fact that there is a quota. A few years ago, U Penn actually got some sort of punishment from the rest of the Ivy League for "cheating" by letting in too many athletes whose grades/scores were substantially below the U Penn's school average. I went to Yale College and I'm now at Harvard Law. I didn't play sports. But I know several classmates who did, and got recruited by the college's coaches. But it's a small minority of the student body. Oh, and by the way, you don't need a lot of money to go to an Ivy. These schools are famous for being rich schools, and part of being rich is that they have a lot of financial aid grant money to give to anyone who can get into the school but can't pay for it. At the top 3 schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton), the policies are even more generous. At Harvard or Yale, for example, you don't have to pay ANY tuition if your family makes less than $60,000 per year, and you only have to pay 10% of your family income if your family makes less than $180,000 (Harvard's guideline) or less than $220,000 (Yale's guideline).