College Admissions Strategy

What Moves the Needle for Colleges

Why grades and test scores only get you to Round 2, and what actually decides it. The advice you need so you don’t get swallowed up by the noise you hear every day.

Why the noise is so loud

Every family applying to college today is buried in advice. A neighbor swears that a summer program at an Ivy League campus got her son in. A group chat is convinced that test scores no longer matter. A video with two million views says you need a nonprofit by tenth grade. Someone on a forum posts a perfect profile that was rejected everywhere, and suddenly everyone is panicking.

Most of that advice is a single story: one student, one college, one year, with none of the context that decided the outcome. Treating one story as a rule is how families spend time and money on things that do not matter while neglecting the things that do.

The good news is that colleges are not as mysterious as the noise makes them seem. They publish what they value, they answer national surveys about what they weigh, and they tell counselors exactly what they want to know. When you start from what colleges actually say, a clear pattern appears: two very different questions, asked in order.

Admissions in two rounds

Colleges do not literally label their process “Round 1” and “Round 2,” and every school reads a little differently. But at selective colleges, the way an application is evaluated works very much like this:

Here is why Round 2 so often decides the outcome. At the top of the applicant pool, strong academics are common:

Sources: College Board 2025 SAT Suite Annual Report and Class of 2025 AP results; The Harvard Crimson.

The eight Ivy League schools together enroll fewer than 20,000 first year students each year. When the number of students with top scores, AP schedules and near perfect grades is many times larger than the number of seats, the academic record alone cannot separate them. As Princeton’s former dean of admission Janet Rapelye put it:

Even inside the academic rating, colleges reward work that goes beyond grades. Court documents from the Harvard admissions case showed that applicants are rated on a scale from 1 to 6 across categories such as academic, extracurricular, personal and overall. Near perfect grades and scores typically earned a strong academic rating, while the very top academic rating typically involved academic work reviewed by a faculty member, the kind of research that happens outside the classroom. On the extracurricular side, a strong rating reflected significant school and possibly regional accomplishment. Grades and scores get you considered. What you do with them is what sets you apart.

What colleges say they weigh

The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) regularly surveys four year colleges about how much importance they place on each part of the application. The red bars below are Round 1 factors. The blue bars are where Round 2 is decided.

Source: NACAC, Factors in the Admission Decision, Fall 2023 admission cycle, 185 responding colleges.

Two details matter. First, the Round 2 factors carry more weight than their dark bars suggest. Extracurriculars are rated of considerable importance by only 6.5% of colleges, but another 44.3% call them moderately important, and character is weighed by nearly two out of three colleges. That is exactly the tiebreaker territory where selective decisions are made. Second, the 4.9% figure for test scores is an average across all colleges, most of which are test optional. At the most selective colleges, testing is back, as you will see below.

More than three out of four colleges say grades in college prep courses carry considerable importance. English, math, science, history and world language come first, and many colleges recalculate GPA using only those courses. Trends tell a story too: steady improvement reads very differently from a slide in junior year, which is usually the last full year a college sees before decisions.

Grades are built in small moments, such as missed homework, a skipped retake, or a test taken without real preparation. This is where strong academic advising and executive function coaching pay off long before any application opens.

Strength of curriculum is rated of considerable importance by 63.8% of colleges, and it is judged against what your school offers. On the Common App school report, your counselor compares your course selection with other college prep students at your school and chooses a rating from “less than demanding” up to “most demanding.”

Here is the catch that makes Round 2 so important: at competitive high schools, many applicants earn that top rating. A full AP or IB schedule is often the price of admission to Round 2, not the thing that wins it. Take the hardest courses where you can earn strong grades, especially in the subjects tied to what you want to study, but do not expect five more APs to separate you from students who took the same schedule. Harvard’s Making Caring Common project specifically cautions against overloading on AP classes for the sake of appearances.

As of October 2026, more than 70 colleges require the SAT or ACT, at least in some situations, for students applying for fall 2027 entry, and more selective colleges are returning to testing each year.

Sources: The College Investor (policies checked October 2026) and Academic Approach. Always confirm on each college’s admissions site.

When Dartmouth reinstated its requirement in February 2024, it cited research by its own economists finding that SAT scores predicted success at Dartmouth better than high school GPA, and that many less advantaged applicants were withholding scores that would have helped them. Colleges read scores in the context of your high school.

Our standard advice: aim for at or above the 75th percentile of the admitted range at the colleges you care about. A higher score is always better, and you can take the SAT or ACT more than once, especially at colleges that superscore. Start with our SAT vs ACT comparison and the 2026-27 test dates.

What clearing Round 1 looks like

• Strong grades in core subjects, with a steady or rising trend
• The most demanding schedule you can succeed in, relative to your school
• A test score at or above the middle of the admitted range, ideally near the 75th percentile, wherever you submit

Check all three, and your file moves on. Now the real competition starts.

A passion project is a piece of work a student conceives, builds and owns, driven by a real interest rather than a checklist. It can be an app, an engineering prototype, a research question, a business, a film, a nonprofit or a public program. What makes it powerful in Round 2 is that nobody else in the pile has the same one.

The best projects share three traits: they start from something the student genuinely cares about, they produce something real that other people can see or use, and they grow over time instead of appearing the summer before senior year. You can see how our students take this further in our guide to passion projects, research, publication and patents.

Colleges are building communities, and they want students who already make theirs better. The difference between impact and a resume line is that impact can be measured by who it helps. A few examples from students our advisors have guided:

Notice what these have in common. Each solved a problem close to home. Each served real people. Each can be described in a single sentence with a number in it. Harvard’s Making Caring Common project makes the same point about service: sustained, local work done with a community carries far more weight than a one week trip done for one.

Plenty of students have ideas. Far fewer launch them, run into problems, fix them and keep going until something works. That follow through is what admissions readers are looking for, and it is visible on an application: a product people actually use, a program that kept running, a paper that was submitted, an event that happened, results that can be counted.

MIT says it plainly. Among the qualities it looks for are initiative, risk taking and hands on creativity. Those words describe a student who builds things and sees them through. In Round 2, one finished project with real results beats five that stayed ideas.

Most meaningful opportunities for high school students are never posted publicly. Research positions, lab spots, field experience and serious projects usually come through a relationship: a professor, a professional, a school leader or a mentor who knows the student and is willing to open a door.

That is why networking matters so much in Round 2. A mentor gives a student guidance, higher standards and access to real work. Just as important, a mentor who has watched a student execute can speak to it, in a recommendation, an introduction or a reference for the next opportunity. Recommendations from people who have seen a student do real work carry weight that a generic letter cannot.

Networking for a teenager is not collecting business cards. It is showing up prepared, following through on what you promise, and treating every introduction as the start of a working relationship. At ConnectPrep, we develop mentorships for our students that are not open to the general public, built on relationships with schools, administrators, colleges and leaders in their fields, and then we prepare students to make the most of them.

An internship or research experience stands out in Round 2 when it is selective, substantive and connected to the student’s direction. The question a reader asks is simple: did the student contribute something real, or did they attend something?

• Selective beats expensive. Some of the most respected summer programs, such as MIT’s Research Science Institute and the Telluride Association Summer Seminar, are free and highly competitive. A price tag is not a selection process.
• Real roles beat observation. Contributing to a lab project, a company or a public program says more than shadowing.
• Direction beats variety. An internship that connects to a student’s projects and intended major strengthens the whole story.
• Faculty reviewed work stands out. As the Harvard court documents showed, academic work reviewed by a faculty member is the kind of accomplishment associated with the very top academic ratings.

You can see a sample of the internships, research placements and selective programs our students have earned on our high school academic advising page.

The final Round 2 question is the simplest and the hardest: if this student were not on campus next fall, what would be missing? Students who can answer that clearly tend to have a through line, a set of interests, projects and experiences that connect and build on each other.

Being well rounded is not the goal. A class full of well rounded students all looks the same. Colleges build a well rounded class out of students who are each distinctive. That is why the Common App’s own guidance is to “focus on what activities can best tell that story” rather than the number listed. Up to ten activities fit in the Activities and experiences section, but three that connect and show depth will beat ten that do not.

Differentiation also comes from real life. Making Caring Common encourages families to report substantial responsibilities, such as caring for a sibling or grandparent or working to help support the household. These are part of who a student is, and many students leave them off because they assume they do not count. They do.

Everything above reaches the reader through a few parts of the application. Essays are rated of considerable importance by 18.9% of colleges and moderately important by another 37.3%. The 2026-27 Common App prompts are unchanged, with the same 650 word limit (see our guide to the 2026-27 essay prompts). The strongest essays do not list accomplishments. They show how a student thinks and why their work matters to them.

Recommendations confirm the story. On the school report, a counselor can rate a student on a scale that tops out at “one of the top few encountered in my career,” and that rating is earned over years of engagement, curiosity and follow through.

Finally, interest and timing matter at many colleges. Demonstrated interest is rated of considerable importance by 15.7% of colleges and moderately important by another 27.6%, so check section C7 of each college’s Common Data Set. Applying early is the strongest signal of all, and the admit rate gap is large at many selective schools:

Class of 2030 figures as reported by College Essay Advisors. Early pools often include recruited athletes and especially strong applicants, and early decision is binding, so compare financial aid before committing. Plan your timing with our college application deadlines database.

Generic vs. differentiated

Two students can have the same transcript and the same score and still look completely different in Round 2. Here is what the difference often looks like:

What does not move the needle

Your five question noise filter

Before you act on the next piece of advice you hear, run it through these five questions.

Both rounds, year by year

Explore more: college admissions counseling, high school academic advising, SAT prep, ACT prep, and direct admissions.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. NACAC, Factors in the Admission Decision (Fall 2023 admission cycle).
2. College Board, 2025 SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report, Total Group.
3. College Board, Class of 2025 builds on a decade of gains in AP participation and performance.
4. The Harvard Crimson, Day one of the admissions trial and Harvard’s admissions rating guidelines.
5. Princeton Alumni Weekly, With 8.2% chosen, the most selective class ever.
6. Common App, What’s New with Common App, First Year 2026-2027, and Activities section guidance.
7. Common App first year school report form.
8. MIT, MIT Facts: Undergraduate Admissions.
9. Higher Ed Dive, Dartmouth restores its standardized testing requirement (February 2024).
10. The College Investor, Colleges requiring SAT and ACT scores for 2027 (October 2026), and Academic Approach, Columbia reinstates ACT/SAT.
11. College Essay Advisors, Admissions statistics for the Class of 2030.
12. Making Caring Common, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 5 tips for more caring college admissions.

This article is published by ConnectPrep. “Round 1” and “Round 2” describe how selective admissions generally works, not a formal process at any single college. Admissions policies and statistics change every year, so confirm current requirements directly with each college. © 2026 ConnectPrep. All Rights Reserved.