College admission officers consider a number of factors in judging an applicant. According to The Princeton Review, roughly the following order of importance is acknowledged.

GPA/difficulty of curriculum (e.g., a B in an Honors or AP course is better than an A in a regular course – but that doesn’t hold true for a C in an Honors course…)

SAT I and SAT II scores

Class rank

Application essays

Extracurricular activities (QUALITY counts more than quantity; being a member of 15 organizations but not an effective participant is detrimental; it shows lack of focus and looks suspiciously like “padding” for the college application.)

Recommendations (Especially important for scholarships – more on this later.)

Interviews

Intangibles

Every college is different. Large schools have less time to spend on the application. Large schools – or those with a high number of applicants (Boston College has 12,000 applicants for 2000 places) – use items one and two to “sift” applicants; the other items are used only if you get to Level 2. State schools often use a formula of SAT + class rank; that’s all. The formula is different for each school but it is published: Apply only if you fit the formula OR qualified for the Olympics in a sport that school plays OR will be taking classes in a building named after your grandfather.