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I think the reputation of your high school and essays by dulac89
Carry an extremely high weight. I am hardly an expert in this as I’ve only been through this process with one child however the private school that my kids go to prides itself on having a top caliber college counseling department. There are six college counselors dedicated to a school with 120 students in each class. Everyone of those college counselors was the admissions representative for our region for a well respected university. What they told us is that while Academic performance is of course important, that just lays the initial foundation. As others have mentioned, GPA and class rank is put into the context of the school they come from and when they were working for their respective universities one of their main jobs was to know the high schools in their area of responsibility. Specifically, to know things like an unweighted 3.7 at school A might actually indicate stronger academic performance than an unweighted 4.0 at school B.
My daughter was the 3.75 kid, but she comes from a high school that is known to be demanding and not prone to any grade inflation. And as we have heard from many of her high school friends, she has found college to be easier than she expected- still hard but not as hard as she expected and the amount of homework and material that is comparable to high school. Friends of hers at her university now, who were rockstar straight A kids in high school, are incredibly stressed about the volume and intensity of the work.
And as discussed elsewhere in the thread, Universities want two things numbers wise: they want a low acceptance rate but they want a high number of accepted students to matriculate. They want to be hard to get into but those that get in all want to go there. Which is why they look at so many other factors, essays very high on the list, but also other things like did you visit campus, did you sign up for email lists, do you participate in webinars, do you open all of the emails that they send you, etc. all of those things demonstrate interest and will help differentiate the strong academic student who is casting a wide net and a strong academic student who is laser focused on their school
I want to put a plug-in for Dennis Ellers again, who posts here as 02Dad and runs a college counseling service. A couple of the admissions people that we met at Wake Forest after our daughter matriculated remembered her and her essays and how interesting they thought they were. That an admissions person actually remembered her essays and specifically mentioned them really tells me how much focus they put on them. We feel the essays (and Wake has a LOT of them) allowed her to tell her unique story about who she is as a person and why she would be such an asset to Wake. I was blown away at her essays, and they were all her (Dennis guided her on how to move things around and expand on certain points/minimize other points, but the essays were all her).