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[quote=Anonymous]It depends on what you mean by "really good"

Typically there is some academic threshold a university wants to meet.  At the most competitive schools, this means great GPA taking all the hardest course load with great SAT scores (you need the full package if you want to go someplace like Harvard).  At other schools, they'll just use a GPA and/or SAT or class rank cutoff (often larger flagship state universities take this approach).  At other schools they'll look at the applicants more holistically--and taking a rigorous courseload even if you get a few Bs matters because it shows intellectual curiosity (often smaller schools like SLACs).

Typically, it seems to me that leadership, extracurriculars, charity, etc. is used as a tie-breaker for equally academic qualified candidates, i.e. if you don't meet the academic threshold for the school, your extracurriculars don't matter so much.  At someplace like Harvard, there are more great GPA, great test score, tons of AP/IB class kids than they can ever accept, so it matters for the sake of differentiating you from the rest of the students.  But it almost never means that a B+ student who didn't take the most rigorous course load offered by their school will get into Harvard just because of their amazing extracurriculars.  There are certainly exceptions--development cases, etc. but most of the development cases were a little closer to the cut academically than that anyway.

It is somewhat of a crapshoot, every university has their own policy, and every year there are kids who get into no way in hell reaches and kids who seem like they should have plenty of options who only get into one safety.[/quote]

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