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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have questions for PPs who say GPA is king and stay close to Naviance/Scoir gpa patterns.

Our DC has a lower GPA than top kids bc he coasted during 9th grade and got a couple B+, but has since stepped up big time and been straight As since 10th on most rigorous course load. In fact some top kids (GPA wise) are not taking all of these most rigorous courses in order to maintain their 3.95ish GPA (unweighted and our school doesn’t assign higher GPA to tougher courses). Only about 18-24 get into each of these courses, you can count on one hand kids who are in all of the hardest tracks and getting As (my DC is). Question here is: would our DC still be looked at as a lower tier applicant from our school even when he is currently (in 11th grade) a top student? Should he plan to avoid popular schools the top GPA kids will apply to during ED round? SAT is very high if that matters in this context. [/quote]

This is impossible to answer. I don’t think 9th grade grades are disqualifying, especially for boys, but [b]at the same time students are compared to others at their school. If there are other students at your school who have the same-ish rigor and higher grades in ninth grade, they will likely be more attractive candidates if all else is about equal. At my dc’s school, looking at past data, certain Ivies seem absolutely consistent in that they have never taken a student with an imperfect GPA.[/b] For those schools it seems particularly unlikely, but of course you never know. [/quote]

This is Stanford at our school. They say they don't look at freshman year grades but they absolutely do relative to other kids from the same high school. If a 3.99 overall is applying, they are going to beat out the 3.89 who had perfect grades from 10th grade on but a few Bs freshman year.  It's all very clear in the data. There is literally a line.

[/quote]

Same at our HS for Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth.
Weird.[/quote]

The GPA ALWAYS matters most.[/quote]

Definitely not at some schools:
UChicago; Northwestern; Penn; Columbia; Vanderbilt; Rice and even Cornell (but they always seem to be looking for something very specific that none of us can figure out)

With Cornell, kids who get into Harvard or Yale or Stanford will routinely not get into Cornell.

Same with the fact that they may get into Dartmouth but not Cornell.[/quote]

From our school, gpa (plus test scores) are absolutely king. But we probably have fewer donors, legacies etc than other schools since we are a public hs.[/quote]

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