Students must have a high class ranking to gain admission into a technical college. Techincal colleges seek the top students from each school. Eighty-two percent of students enrolled at Villanova were in the top 10 percent of their class, and 98 percent were in the top 20 percent.
Technical colleges look for students who did well on the ACT or SAT exams. Georgia Tech likes students to be in competitive ranges, which they describe as between 1920 and 2160 for the SAT. Their required ACT range is between 29 and 33. Villanova requires "middle 50 percent range SAT and ACT scores. The combined math and language score is 1330-1600 and the required ACT score is 20-33."
You must stand out academically from among your high school classmates to get into a technical college. For example, the desired grade point average for a typical Villanova student is 3.8-4.20 "on a weighted scale." The GPA cannot be high due to having a easy course load. A weighted scale suggests that students took rigorous AP and honors classes for which the top score is above a 4.0.
Students must show the propensity to work hard long before they apply to college. Having a challenging workload in high school will show the college you are capable and determined. Students applying to MIT are required to have taken high school physics, chemisty, and biology. For math, they should have reached the calculus level. They need four years of language and two years of science and a foreign language. Georgia Tech specifies that a student should have taken four years of math, including a higher level math beyond Algebra II. They point out that statistics does not count as a higher level math course.