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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Sidwell senior parent here of kid with slightly higher GPA. 3.7 is excellent for the school. Your DD is correct that there will be a handful of kids > 3.9, but it’s a tiny group in each grade for the reasons PP said.

Our experience this year is that these “low” compared to public schools GPAs only hold you back if you apply to giant public universities **that are unknown to Sidwell specifically** Places with a well worn pathway— Michigan, UVA, Wisconsin, W&M — are no issue.  Problems arise with competitive flagships where kids from Sidwell never apply. They seem to take a dim view of a 3.7-3.9 compared to the thousands of applicants with 4.7s. Let’s use Florida, Texas and Georgia as examples.  California schools are their own beast and just made huge admissions changes this year …. UNC admits no one, so.

The > 3.5 doesn’t hold your kid back from very competitive LACs or T20 if the rest of their package is very good. “Very good” need not mean URM or recruited athlete btw.  There are a lot of kids this year not in those groups and not 3.9+ according to my son who will attend some very very top schools next year.  Keeping it vague for their privacy

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GDS parent here. I agree w/ all of this 100%. I have a 3.8 kid who guesstimates that there are 12-15 kids (out of a class of 150 ish) higher than them in GPA/GPA combined w/ rigor.

Few things to note on how colleges view this since we are going through it now: what is above is absolutely right. The very large state schools that arent used to Sidwell, NCS, GDS kids and dont have a long history of accepting them will not have context and will be VERY tough. UC schools in particular have become all but impossible for local private school kids.

Also Cali and other students take multiple AP / AP level courses and often take college classes too while in HS so they goose their weighted GPAs to 4.6+. at UCs, GPA is a major screen (look up the public report UC schools published last year on how they screen and these days they use AI to screen as well) ...and so that make Berkeley and UCLA very tough last 2-3 years for kids from Sidwell/GDS.

Many threads on this here and you can look up UC school admit rates by high school on UC portal. Evidence is all there. Plus taking more than 2 or max 3 UL or AP level or honors level classes at GDS/Sidwell in a semester is really a beat down. All but impossible. The public school and California kids finish HS with 7 to 14 AP courses and the boost that gives the kid on weighted GPA....plus UC schools dont count "Extended" classes at GDS as honors and dont weight those.

So anyway, long answer to 3.7 is very good. In an ideal world if you are gunning SLACs or Top 30, then I would say, SAT needs to be 1500+ or ACT 34-36 to take any question off the table. Or else a hook. Otherwise, it's just the usual lottery game and try to have some real target schools. Everything we early 90s college parents thought was a safety or target is now a reach for almost any kid.

Also at our school anything < 25% admit rate is considered reach.

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What types of schools is your kid applying to?  
If you're not comfortable naming them maybe add in some that are similar.  Thank you![/quote]

Not the O/P but kid who has almost identical stats from another of the top 3 or whatever we call them local private schools

SAT mid 1400s
GPA 3.8 unweighted
Not athlete, not URM

The total list considered was (didn’t apply to all, picked a high reach below SCEA and was not accepted at it; has gotten accepted to a couple of the rolling schools below.)

UK / English speaking Europe schools like St Andrews, LSE, Trinity Dublin
US safeties / foundations - Pitt, Fordham, New School
Targets - Wake, BU, U Vermont, UC Irvine, UC Davis, Occidental, U Toronto, Wm and Mary, Brandeis, Case Western
Reach - BC, NYU, U of M, Tufts, Northeastern, USC, UC Santa Barbara 
High reach - Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, Columbia, UC Berkeley, UCLA[/quote]

It would seem that a 3.8 would get you into at least one of the reaches or high reaches as a 3.8 puts you in the top 10% of the class and almost no-one in the class will go to a school below any of your choices. 
(i.e. the weakest kids in the class in recent years have matriculated to places like Fordham, Pitt, Vermont).
[i]It's interesting how much luck is involved and how much overlap there is in where the top kids (3.8) apply and weakest kids (under 3.0) matriculate.  [/i][/quote]

There are probably 25 students with GPS above 3.8 each year. 10 students with GPA above 3.9. Median GPA is around 3.55.[/quote]

PP -- At Sidwell[/quote]

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