I have received a 2.8 first semester and now a 2.7(can change at the end of the semester) my junior year of high-school. I had a 3.8 freshmen year and a 4.0 sophomore year with 4 Ap classes. This have been a very depressing year for me and I haven’t been able to keep the grades I know I can maintain. When college Application comes, Will an explanation from my counselor allow my junior year grades to kind of slide by. I have a high weighted GPA due to getting 4 As in my Ap classes my sophomore year so I still believe I have a chance at the top schools. My SAT score was 1530(800 MATH AND 730 CR)
GPA(UW:3.56 WEIGHTED:4.12
I was thinking about Applying to all the Ivies with an explanation. I need opinions from my fellow CCs that went through college admissions. Also want to know if anyone knows a person similar to my situation that got admitted to top universities.
PS: I am also in the Ib diploma currently which is also a reason why my grades has suffered!
Agree that using the IB program as a reason for poor grates will reflect negatively on you. For some perspective, 96% of admitted students had a 3.7 or above (presumably with additional impressive ECs, test scores, rigor etc).
Why all? The Ivies (and Stanford) are all very different. A few might fit you, but there’s no way all of them are a great fit.
Add safeties and matches. Apply to colleges that are right for you not just right for the ranking charts.
To me this makes it look like you want to apply to prestigious universities just because they are prestigious. This is a bad idea. Getting less than a 3.0 Junior year and explaining this as “I am also in the Ib diploma currently which is also a reason why my grades has suffered!” makes it look as if you also didn’t think very hard about why you wanted to take the IB diploma program.
You need to think about what you actually want in a university. Large classes versus small classes, engineering versus liberal arts, big city versus small town, academically very rough with long hours of homework and very tough tests versus more moderate amount of work, expensive versus affordable, near home or far away from home; these are things to think about.
You also need to think about what schools you can actually get into (starting this thread is a good start in that direction), and what schools you can afford to go to.
Finally, you have to think about how to get you grades way up for senior year.
If you read other posts on CC, you will see over and over again students who applied to the “prestigious” universities and didn’t get in. Some of them had an unweighted 4.0 over a full 4 years of high school. You will also see posts from students who thought really hard about how much they wanted to go to Stanford, but didn’t bother to think much about universities that they could actually get accepted to. Most of them did NOT have a 3.0 or less junior year. You will also see posts from students who did get into their “dream” schools, but couldn’t afford to go and forgot to have an acceptable affordable backup.
You don’t need to go to a prestigious university to be happy, or to be successful. I did go to a prestigious university for undergrad and hated it. A dream turned into a nightmare. I then worked for a few years, and went to Stanford for graduate school and loved it. I would have been much better off with a slightly less prestigious (but still very good) undergraduate university, then the same years working, then the same school for my Masters degree. Since then I have nearly always worked for bosses who went to less prestigious universities. One of the best bosses that I ever had went to a university that I never heard of. Another went to a state university. A third went to university in Canada. A fourth went to seminary school. None of them had to go to a prestigious university in order to be the manager of a group of engineers with degrees from MIT and Stanford (and RPI and UNH and UMass and many other universities).
Identify colleges you can afford and are sure you will get into. It means colleges with most GPA 's around the B level that will like your test scores. Colleges that change lives would be a good place to start. Be aware that some of them (Whitman, Reed, St Olaf, Rhodes) would be high matches for you, not matches or safeties, but most others should be fairly safe if you start showing interest now.
RUN THE NPC for each college. (You’ll notice different results.)
What state do you live in?
Forget the IVY’s and Stanford…find a safety and match school…work really hard and see if you can transfer to you dream school…don’t count on it. Check the accepted profile of students accepted from each schools web site and smell the coffee.