Thanks for the response. Yeah, at least something good came from my bike accident.
I went to UW, where classes are huge, grades are distributed in a numeric spectrum (e.g. 3.7 instead of A-), and asian students are abundant (myself included).
I was really hoping that my good DAT scores would counterbalance my lower science GPA, because they show that I am intellectually competent. For what it's worth, I had a very high GPA my first quarter in college, which started to decline until junior year, where it remained pretty high. It makes a difference if they see improvement, yeah?
As for the letters, don't schools want professors to evaluate qualities that can't be gleaned from your grades/test scores (like your personality, motivation, interpersonal skills), or is this not always the case?