I am a current senior going through the application process and my application looks pretty good—I have a 2360 SAT (1600 on the 1600 point scale), a decent amount of extracurricular activities, good SAT II scores, and varsity sports credits—but my one worry is my GPA. My school uses an x/100 scale rather than the typical 4.0 scale and we show colleges unweighted GPAs (extra points from AP and honors courses are not included). I go to a feeder school for a lot of prestigious universities (think Yale, Rice, Stanford, etc), and while you'd think all classes would be challenging, honors and AP classes are far more difficult than regular classes, so much so that the 86 I fought for in AP chemistry could have been an easy 100 in the "regular" chemistry course that my friends who don't care about school took. In fact, many of them even got averages over 100, though those aren't reported. My GPA is an 89.5 (rounded up that's an A! But I believe the exact decimal is reported to colleges) and I'm wondering how much my taking honors classes rather than regular courses will affect me...obviously GPAs aren't the only things colleges look at, but my dream school (Stanford) accepts people within the A range (the lowest they've accepted from my school is a 90.5). Obviously I know that Stanford will be a tough school to get into, but a lot of other less prestigious colleges have very high average accepted GPAs, so I hope my class choice won't end up biting me in the ass...I've calculated my weighted GPA and it would be a 97.9, so I'm sure I could have laid off on some of the courses I took.
I plan on either applying to Rice University or Stanford early. I know Rice has a 33% acceptance rate for early admissions, but if I were to hypothetically get into both schools, I'd regret being forced to go to Rice because I applied early. If I apply early to Stanford and don't get in, I've wasted my early application! As you can see, I'm in a bit of a dilemma. Any help on either of these fronts would be awesome.