Hi guys. So I am committed to go to Baylor university and I got in with the second best merit scholarship. My first 3 years of high school I took all honors classes and only got A’s and B’s. I also took 4 AP classes and got 5’s on all (APUSH, AP Lang, AP Gov, and AP Microeconomics). My ACT is a 33. However, senior year comes and I made the idiotic decision to take BC Calculus. Hardest class of my life. First semester I scraped by and barely got a C (first C of my life). However, second semester is pretty much over and I have a D with no hope of getting a C. My question is, will this at all affect my merit scholarship? If I get a 4 or 5 on the AP test will this help me at all. The rest of my classes I will get A/B’s in so BC Calc is really my only concern. I am really stressed out about this and would love an answer. Thank you.
*I posted this under the wrong category earlier so I reposted it here.
You need to talk with your guidance counselor and with Baylor about this. Don’t wait for Baylor to find out when they get your final transcript. Call today. Explain the situation and offer to retake the class over the summer.
What is reported to Baylor by your high school? My son’s school just sent the final transcript which had single grades for each course. No semester grades unless the course was just one semester. If you are getting a C as your final grade for the year for BC Calc, that is all the college will see. Ask your GC what is exactly sent to the colleges as a final transcript. Everyone should know exactly what colleges are seeing from their highschools, IMO but rarely happens.
It is really going to depend on variable factors. The first and foremost will be the conditions of your scholarship. If you received the scholarship by having a certain gpa the expectation is that you finish high school with grades that are pretty consistent to the ones you got when you were accepted.
You know if your school grades annually or by the semester. If your school grades by the semester and from your post it seems like it does, if you finish with a D that could be a problem
Not only for your scholarship but for your admission.
I agree that you need to have your GC reach out to Baylor and get in front of this immediately
Alright, so I’ll tell you what I did and I’ll tell you what happened. So I ended up getting a 61.9% (D-) in bc calculus second semester and getting As and Bs and 1 C in the rest of my classes. I also ended up getting a 2 on the BC calc AP exam (which translates to a 3 for a AB calc exam). I also did not call my college guidance counselor to let them know I got a D. I just ignored the problem completely. So, basically, I was pretty stressed I was gonna lose scholarship money. I had gotten the second highest available academic scholarship for my college (Baylor) and I also decided to take the ACT in the summer to try and improve my super score to a 34. I ended up successful and improved my super score and submitted that score to my college in June. Because my super score improved they upgraded my academic scholarship to the best possible. So that made me happy because I thought that would offset the money I would lose due to my senior year second semester grades. Anyway, on July 1 my second semester grades (including my D-) were submitted to my college. Through the first couple of weeks in July I kept nervously waiting for an email from my school asking about my second semester grades or telling me I would lose scholarship money. I never got one. It is now early August and I have already paid for my first semester freshmen year. I did not lose any scholarship money or even receive an email addressing my second semester grades.
Basically the moral of the story is if you slip up and get some senioritis senior year of high school, or bomb a difficult class, your admission and academic scholarships should be fine so long as your not going to Harvard or something. So don’t stress like me.
You were very lucky.
My advice to HS seniors…don’t let your grades slip…and that goes for everyone…not just Yale or Harvard potential students.
The lesson is NOT to allow for senioritis. You were lucky. And if you’re a stem major, call it double lucky. Now you need to see what remedial coursework may be required, once there. If you are a stem major, I’d be prepping, deep and fast, now.
I’m encouraging my kid who is pretty good at math, but not a math prodigy by any means, to take BC Calc in 12th grade, even though kid will definitely NOT be in STEM (at most, med school). The reason I’m encouraging kid to take it, is because it’s taught by one of the best teachers, ever, for whom we have the highest respect. I’m telling kid, take the class and see if you can learn something from this man. (Kid had that teacher in tenth grade, says he was the absolute best teacher.) I figure that even if kid gets a bad grade in the class, kid will still learn a lot of Calculus. By end of 12th grade, who cares about the grade? If kid has to explain, kid can tell the college it was a challenge, with a fantastic teacher. After all, many kids don’t take Calculus at all in high school, and if they do, not as an AP class, or only AB Calc, instead of BC.
Not all colleges are so forgiving of D grades on the final transcript that they have not seen before.
Before more users derail the thread, I’ll thank the OP for the update, wish him/her the best of luck, and close the thread.