Honest question: How well do good academic scores in high school correlate with success in non-scientific majors? I go to a top-tier engineering university, and I know of multiple individuals who had perfect SAT scores and GPAs in high school that have been utter disappointments, and I've known people who by no reasonable metric should have gotten in that break curves in nearly every class. Hell, I was the first of 3 boys to get accepted here through normal means, but both of my older brothers ended up transferring in and subsequently graduated with GPAs of 3.96 and 4.0, with one now working on a PhD in physics under a Nobel Laureate and the other working in investment banking. I've honestly started to question how much predictive power these tradition metrics actually have among the subsets of students who think they have a good enough chance of getting in to a school to apply in the first place. If anyone knows of any good studies on the subject or perhaps has a data set that could be used for such analysis, please let me know.
