Do colleges care more about overall GPA or individual patterns on transcripts?

[mxnsndgo]

I have a really bad and inconsistent freshman year grades, and a handful of B’s on my sophomore year but have an unweighted GPA of 3.8 which is pretty okay for me (school doesnt offer AP classes) but when colleges see that I didnt do so well on my first 2 years, will that have any effect on my chances? Also, do colleges calculate your GPA from your transcripts again or do they just ask you for it on the application?

[T26E4]

The more selective a college, the more your overall GPA matters. To what extent? Who knows? Most colleges will recalculate your GPA based on your submitted transcript. Again, no “one rules fits all”

[Erin_s_Dad]

Consistently high performance/GPA > Positive Trend GPA > Random GPA

[halcyonheather]

They look at your letter grades more than your reported GPA because different high schools calculate GPA differently. Some colleges recalculate GPA, and others just eyeball your transcript. This is how the University of Michigan [url=https://www.michigandaily.com/content/u-no-longer-recalculate-gpa-admissions-process]described[/url] it when they temporarily stopped recalculating GPAs in 2009:

“What we’re going to still do is that we’re going to look at the courses that were available in the school and we’re going to look at how many of those courses the student took and we’re going to look at it in the context of other students from the high school and we’re going to look at the grades they made in those courses,” Spencer said.

If you have an upward trend, that’s good, but you’ll still be at a disadvantage to people who had really good grades from the beginning.