Without getting into a huge argument with an internet stranger as to the exact extent of my stupidity and/or intelligence, it'd probably be wise to note that nearly 2/3 of high school seniors are going to college now. Someone who is in the top 1-5% of high school seniors really shouldn't have the difficulties I did. I'm not trying to brag, I'm just trying to say that my stats were decent and I wasn't a slacker.
It was really baffling to me that colleges preferred to take people who got 2s and 3s on their AP tests to someone who scored 5s, so long as they had parents who would fork over thousands of dollars. At a poorly funded rural high school where most people were members of FFA, outscoring my classmates wasn't hard, and there weren't many collegebound to begin with, outside of the people with welloff families. It was frustrating to see them get to go instead of me because I didn't have tens of thousands of dollars for the tuition bill. (I mean, a lot of them were in the low to mid twenties on their ACT scores...)