Anonymous wrote:Even if you start prepping for a perfect score, it won’t really help that much. Thousands of applicants with perfect scores are rejected every year. Same with GPA. If you’re having to ask about this, you’re already behind as others have said. You need to be athletic recruit and have amazing extracurricular activities that don’t look contrived. That look like they’re actually a passion project and activities that were started way before high school. And even then it’s a crapshoot.
So...just to be clear, if you are truly a coveted athletic recruit, you don't really need anything else other than minimum grades and test scores. Those minimum grades and test scores depend on the sport (football and basketball are most lenient) and how good a player you are and are definitely high at Princeton and Harvard, relative to say football players in general (but maybe several hundred points lower than the average Harvard or Princeton player).
Duke is a completely different recruiting animal. You need to be a better athlete and your minimum grades/SAT scores can be very low for basketball, football and baseball. A number of Duke basketball players have no intention of graduating, nor does Duke expect them to graduate. They will play one year and get drafted into the NBA.