<p>I'm an 8th grader who has a desire to study at Harvard. I'm currently in the school's "honor program" and I earn all A+'s. I play three instruments, and I play club soccer. My worry concerns community service. I lack the amount of hours I heard I should have been now. I have a total of 16 hours of community service. Does this ruin my chances of entering a universtiy such as Harvard? My ethnicity=asian-american.</p>
<p>My daughter is a junior at Harvard at she didn’t have any community service when she applied – zero, zilch, none! So, don’t worry about. Harvard, and most selective colleges, DO NOT require community service for applicants. If you love volunteering, do it because you have a passion for it, don’t do it to make your college app look good.</p>
<p>Thank you!!</p>
<p>Sir, nothing you do before 9th grade, short of committing a serious crime, or being Magnus Carlsen, matters in the slightest to colleges. I think I skipped like one fifth of my classes in 8th grade and got Cs (not that I’d suggest doing that). Harvard didn’t know or care when they accepted me four years later.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice</p>
<p>Forgive me, but why is an 8th grader posting in this forum about only having 16 hours of community service possibly “ruining his chances”? This is a recipe for becoming a total neurotic by senior year. The only way your chances are “ruined” is if you don’t have fantastic grades in the most rigorous schedule possible (and then some), leadership positions, a demonstrated passion in a specific area preferably with some sort of national standing or achievement, stellar recommendations, compelling essays, and superior standardized test scores. You won’t be able to know if you have all these things until senior year so why obsess about it before HS even starts? Even with all of the above, there is a certain amount of luck and serendipity in the admissions process. Until senior year, just do your best and then when the time comes, see what happens. Learning how to work hard will always pay off no matter where you end up going to school.</p>
<p>dgo: I know you probably think you’re gettng a head start. I’m an HYP Chinese alum and if you were my kid, I don’t know what I’d do. You are seriously off base</p>
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<p>please be very careful about what you say to a middle schooler. </p>
<p>My son had 9 Pass grades on 9 Pass/Fail courses in Middle School. His high school turned them into 6 As and 3 Bs, dropped them to lower academic weighted high school grades and stuck them on his high school transcript. This, in a state where state universities are required, under the law, to accept weighted high school class rank / grades, as is, without modifying them, as the only factor for determining who gets admitted. </p>
<p>Consequently, My son is sitting here with a 219 PSAT (NMSF), a higher corresponding SAT score, 11 Honors courses, 12 AP courses, 750s on 2 SAT Subject Tests, four 5s and one 4 on AP Tests in junior year, but cannot get accepted to a state flagship because of his middle school grades. So, what a kid does in middle school does not translate to the same thing in all states.</p>
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<p>Is it a policy in your state that middle school grades must be counted as high school grades? Was this known ahead of time? The problem there seems to be the high school’s arbitrary evaluation of middle school grades, not that colleges look at the middle school grades themselves because they simply don’t. And I don’t know what state you’re in to be sure but I’m skeptical that 3 Bs are themselves enough to make or break admission, especially since it seems his transcript has five or six years’ worth of classes instead of four.</p>
<p>Point noted but to my credit I did say “I wouldn’t suggest doing this” and if a student bases his academic career on singular advice from an internet poster named DwightEisenhower, well, that’s a different problem entirely.</p>
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<p>We are going off topic a little, but</p>
<p>No, after all, these courses were taken at a district where they were taken as Pass/Fail courses (not counted on high school transcript). So, A to C = Pass, C&D = Fail. Ahead of time this is how my son thought they would be treated. This is how the grade issuing teacher and district explained they would be treated. However, he transferred to a neighboring district high school that decided to treat the internal grades as real grades. Unfortunately, for my son, the other kids in the high school did not take these type of courses in their middle schools. They took honor level middle school courses that don’t hit the high school transcript. So, 9 academic weighted grades, some Bs others As that were meant to be PASS grades, on son’s high school transcript. </p>
<p>The net effect is that in freshman year he could have had straight As all honor level courses and he would earn ~ 4.5 while others taking the same courses would earn a 5.0. The next two years he could take straight honors and earn straight As but GPA would be 4.75. Whereas the other kids would still be at 5.0. Obviously, nobody can take straight honor level courses in high school because there are state and district required high school courses that have to be taken. So, effectively, his highest GPA was about 4.5 for others about 4.8. So, effectively, locked out of the top 10% the day he signed up. In Texas, under the 10% law you cannot get into UT Austin with a class rank below 8%. So, that door was shut before he started high school</p>
<p>The point is, middle school performance can become very meaningful in some states.</p>
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<p>The 3 Bs and 6 As are weighted academic. In other words 3 Bs carry the weight of 3 Cs. 6 As carry the weight of 6 Bs. In other words a penalty for not taking high school honor courses in middle school.</p>
<p>This is when a kid earned 6 As and 3 Bs. So, can you imagine what would have happened if he came in with 9 Cs, like you? After all, several kids earned Cs and did not mind it because they believed these were PASS/ FAIL courses, where C=A= PASS. This could easily happen to a kid who had an A or B average, but decided to not take the final exam, knowing the grade would drop to a C but still show up as a PASS. In this situation the kid would start high school with a 2.0 on a 5.0 scale with 9 grades.</p>
<p>^^Are you familiar with the phrase “beating a dead horse”?</p>
<p>You are right. I am sorry.Wanna swap?</p>