I recently graduated as an undergraduate, but my cumulative GPA was an overall 3.6. However, my “all institution” GPA says 3.3 which is terrible if you want to attend post-graduate programs.
So I began with community college to work on my Associate’s Degree. I graduated with a 3.0 GPA (the first semester is the only semester that I got 1 D and mostly C’s, but after that, I never got anything lower than a B-). After finishing community college, I transferred to a 4-year college and did a lot stronger, graduating with a GPA of 3.6, but I wondered why I wasn’t eligible for Cum Laude until I saw that they added the grades from CC which equated to 3.3 overall (basically, if I wanted a 3.5 which is my goal, I had to finish 4-year college with a 4.0). But I don’t care about not earning the distinction, but my worry is will graduate school admission officers care about how I did in my 4-year school, or will they use the “all institution” GPA of 3.3?
Depends on what kind of graduate school in terms of how much your older college record will be weighted relative to your newer college record, or if there are other factors affecting which courses will be seen as more important.
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Grad schools are going to look at your full college academic record, but I expect some will give more weight to the more recent grades from the 4 year school.
What graduate programs are you looking to apply to? Your profs and/or college career center should be able to answer your questions. Good luck.
There are several key variables in grad school admissions, particularly the type of grad school and the field/subject, that affects the relative weight a program gives to test scores, LoRs, relevant experience and GPA (also, CGPA - cumulative gpa- and SGPA -subject gpa- are frequently considered separately).
What field/program are you looking at?
Graduate school admissions will want to see all of the college and university courses that you have taken across all of the colleges and universities that you have attended at any point. They will look at what specific courses you have taken and what specific grades you got in each course. Of course your references, GRE scores (if applicable), and other factors are also important.
At least in my experience, based on my results decades ago, it appears that courses that are relevant to your major are more important than courses that are way outside your major. Specifically, as a math major, I had two art courses with rather bad grades (at which point I gave up on taking art classes). I do not think that they cared at all about my art courses.
Also, in my experience a lot of the students in the same graduate program had some work experience. In most cases, including mine, this experience was very relevant to the graduate program that we were in. One daughter is currently studying in a graduate program and her work experience also appears to be a major part of what got her accepted to the program.
In many cases your more recent classes may matter more. University admissions (whether undergraduate or graduate) know that different students mature at different points in time. If you have done very well for the past two years, that may help you.
I do not know if there even is such a thing as a “safety” for graduate admissions. Perhaps for most of us who got a job after getting a bachelor’s, and who are applying to graduate programs while employed, perhaps the “safety” is to continue on the job for another year and try again. I think that you just need to apply and see what happens.
In my case, and in my daughter’s case, having worked for a couple of years after getting our bachelor’s degree did help us to be sure what we wanted to study next. At least for us getting some work experience was helpful both in terms of helping us get accepted to an appropriate program, and in knowing that we were applying to the correct type of program. The same would be true for my wife. However, what sort of program each of us chose was very different.
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It depends on the program. The schools that my daughter recently applied to asked for her overall gpa, but other programs that she did not apply to (same degree) also ask for a science gpa.