<p>So my freshmen year I recieved a 2.667 unweighted GPA both semesters.
Sophomore year I had a 3.33 first semester, and then for the past 3 semesters I've had a 4.0 unweighted gpa.
I regret the person I was as a freshmen, but i've worked my ass off to try and fix the mistakes I made. Do colleges care about the overall improvement I've had? Because my unweighted gpa still comes out to be around 3.4, even though I haven't gotten a B in over a year and a half now.</p>
<p>Yes, those schools that look at students more holistically (ie, not the large publics that crunch numbers) will care. Some don’t include freshman GPAs at all (Stanford, for example), and many discount them heavily. That upward trend is what counts here. Looks like you really got your act together and turned yourself around: Good job! Sounds like an essay topic to me.</p>
<p>Really? Stanford does not consider Freshmen year grades? I knew Princeton and the UC system don’t, what other colleges do?</p>
<p>Don’t know - do a search and/or post as a separate question.</p>
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<p>To be clear, some large publics, e.g., Michigan, view applications holistically. You can get a pretty clear idea of what they’re looking for by perusing their admissions rating sheet (click on link to Ratings Sheet, which will open up the actual document in .pdf):</p>
<p>[Office</a> of Undergraduate Admissions: Application Review](<a href=“http://admissions.umich.edu/prospective/prospectivefreshmen/appreview.php]Office”>http://admissions.umich.edu/prospective/prospectivefreshmen/appreview.php)</p>
<p>The very first item listed out of 47 distinct categories (some of them quite broad and open-ended), under Secondary School Academic Performance, is an item that twins “Cumulative GPA” with “Pattern of grade improvement in high school.” I would interpret this to mean that while they will not disregard freshman grades (nor should they, in my estimation), they will credit grade improvement, so that poor freshman grades can be substantially discounted if subsequent academic performance is strong. </p>
<p>I suspect most schools using “holistic” admissions review would do something similar. A few might disregard freshman grades entirely, but probably the majority view is that freshman grades aren’t entirely irrelevant, and disregarding them completely is perhaps unfair to the students who kept their nose to the grindstone for four straight years. But they can be somewhat forgiving of a slow start in HS, a time when many students are quite immature and many have a difficult adjustment to the HS environment.</p>
<p>Yes, having an upward trend is a great asset to an application. It shows personal, as well as academic growth.</p>