What Do Selective Colleges Look for in an Applicant? The Academic Record

What Do Admissions Committees Look At?

How Challenging Is Your Academic Program? 

Many colleges provide students with guidelines about the kinds of preparation they expect successful applicants to have in high school—the number of years of English, mathematics, foreign language, and so forth. Williams College, for example, provides the following guidelines to prospective students:

Applicants should pursue the strongest program of study offered by their schools. Wherever possible, you should take honors or advanced level courses, especially in fields of great interest to you. A challenging and well-balanced program of study ideally  should include: a full four-year sequence in English and mathematics; study of one foreign language for three or, preferably, four years; and three years of study each in the social sciences and laboratory sciences. These are not absolute requirements for admission; rather they are recommendations for developing a strong high school record. 

Usually, these are minimum recommendations; additional years of a single foreign language or mathematics, for example, are viewed favorably. Colleges also expect students to take advantage of opportunities their school may offer to challenge themselves academically through honors or Advanced Placement (AP) courses, or by participating in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. If opportunities for challenging classes are open to you, a selective college will expect you to have taken advantage of them.

AP courses are designed to allow students in high school to take individual college-level classes in subjects of their choosing. The IB is a rigorous two-year curriculum covering a range of subjects, also at the college level. Both are prized among college admissions officers at selective colleges, since they each culminate in rigorous subject matter tests scored by independent graders using calibrated standards. Strong performance in these courses (and particularly on the AP and IB tests themselves) indicates that a student can do college-level work. It has also become fairly common for students, particularly juniors and seniors, to take classes at a local community college or nearby four-year college in subjects where the students have exhausted their high school’s offerings. College admissions officers also favorably note these classes.

Students and parents sometimes ask if it is better to get an A in a regular course or a B in an AP course. My answer is that it is best to get an A in the AP course. - Comment by Harvard admissions officer at group information session,  followed by nervous laughter from the audience

The bottom line is that a straight A record will not make up for a weak course load if your school offers the option of more advanced coursework. Good grades are important, but the rigor of your course load is even more important. Many high schools reward a student who has taken a challenging course with a weighted grade at the end of the semester. If an A in a regular course is worth four points, for example, an A in an AP class may be worth five points. Grade weighting sometimes extends to the pluses and minuses that a student may receive as well, so that an A+ in an AP course might be assigned a total of 5.25 points, while an A– in such a course might be worth 4.75 points. The weighting of honors, IB, and AP classes can result in some astronomical grade point averages (GPAs) for students who take heavy loads of such courses and do exceptionally well in them.

If your school offers AP classes, you look bad not taking them. You shouldn’t take so many that you get bad grades, but you need to challenge yourself.  - College freshman reflecting on the high school experience

It is sometimes disheartening for students to learn that some colleges recompute each applicant’s GPA in unweighted form, including only the years (usually tenth, eleventh, and twelfth) and classes (usually academic “solids” such as English, foreign language, math, science, and social studies) they wish to consider. Admissions officers do this to have a common standard for discussion. But despite any recalculation, due consideration will be given to the nature of the courses you are taking, within the context of the opportunities you have had. A high GPA in a weak curriculum will definitely be less well received by a selective college than a somewhat more mixed record in a challenging one. In addition, two students may have similar GPAs in comparable courses, although one has shown improvement over time while the other has grades that have been declining. The evaluation of these two students’ academic records will be very different; improvement over time will be viewed much more favorably by admissions staff. This is another example of how the evaluation process considers an applicant’s record in context.

Putting the GPA in Context

While colleges place great emphasis on grades and courses, they recognize that grades can be hard to evaluate in isolation. Everyone, including college admissions officers, knows that some high schools (and some teachers) are generous with top marks, while others have more rigorous standards. Grade inflation has become a serious problem at many high schools, both public and private. According to the College Board, 43 percent of students in the high school graduating class of 2008 who took the SAT reported GPAs of at least A–. Fifteen years earlier the figure was just 32 percent.

Grade inflation is a major reason selective colleges like to see students do well on AP tests in addition to doing well in the courses themselves. The AP tests you take at the end of the academic year are scored by the College Board according to national norms, so a student who gets a 4 or 5 on an AP exam (scored 1 to 5 with 5 as the highest possible) has demonstrated excellent mastery of the material, independent of local grading standards. Selective colleges invite, but do not require, students to self-report AP test scores, and you are certainly under no obligation to report disappointing scores. But admissions offices will expect to see AP test results from most of the AP courses you have taken through your junior year, or they may question the rigor of the courses themselves.

There is simply too much variance between schools, their grading policies, and individual grading by teachers for GPAs to have much meaning by themselves. -  High school counselor commenting on variability in the GPA

Some high schools assign a class rank to students on the basis of GPA. Class rank provides information about a student’s grades relative to classmates, and colleges have found it makes the task of evaluating grades easier. But fewer and fewer high schools now compute class rank. Private schools in particular are reluctant to rank their students, since they believe it promotes a more competitive environment and magnifies small or insignificant differences in achievement. Class rank also ignores the strength of the student body overall. A student ranked in the lower half of the class at one school might rank in the top 10 percent at another. Increasingly, public high schools are recognizing these same drawbacks and have stopped ranking their students as well. The absence of explicit class rank makes the job of the admissions office more challenging, but colleges adapt to it and use the information that is available to get a sense of where students stand in their class, more or less.

The School Profile

High schools generally include a “school profile” with each transcript sent as part of a college application. The profile provides summary information about the school’s curriculum and grading policies so that a college can get a general idea of how a student has performed relative to the rest of the class. A profile may show the grade range for each decile of the senior class, as well as the percentage of students who go on to four-year colleges directly from that high school, along with other statistics about the student body such as the SAT distribution, number of students taking and passing AP tests, and so forth. Colleges use this information to supplement data on class rank, or to provide much-needed context when class rank is not provided. Colleges also require students to have a school official, usually a counselor, complete a recommendation form that includes an evaluation of the rigor of a student’s academic program relative to the offerings at the high school. This is another way for colleges to calibrate a student’s grades while trying to ensure that students from poorer schools that do not offer many advanced classes are not penalized for not having taken a program chock-full of them.

Part of the “college mania” is the frequently quoted tidbit that Harvard denies admission to more than 75 percent of the high school valedictorians who apply each year. Several other super-selective and highly selective colleges also deny a majority of the valedictorian applicants. But if you reflect on this for a minute, it is not really surprising. There are more than twenty-seven thousand high schools, both public and private, in the United States. Each of them has someone (or often several students) who achieved the highest grades. Clearly, grades can’t be the whole story in college admissions—there are too many students with very high grades, and too much variation in what those grades really mean—for grades alone to determine who is admitted to a selective college.