At McDaniel, a college education is bigger and deeper than it is at other colleges — we’re interested in discovering your passions, sparking your curiosity, and building your character. Your education involves living among friends and professors. It offers dozens of special opportunities. It focuses both on who you are now and who you want to be.

As a result, we consider many things as we evaluate your application, including:

• secondary school courses and grades. Special consideration is given to accelerated courses. More about advanced placement...
• secondary school class rank and the level of academic competition in your program
• personal traits, goals, and motivation
• recommendations and evaluations by principals, counselors, and teachers
• participation in non-academic activities
• writing sample on the application

For freshmen and transfer students who have fewer than 24 credits, we also look at your SAT or ACT scores, if you opt to submit them. We do not use the writing score on either the ACT or the SAT as part of our admissions process, but instead will continue to require an essay as part of the admissions evaluation.

For non-traditional and transfer students, we also consider post-secondary course work.

And for international students, we also consider performance on the TOEFL exam (for non-native English speakers).