<p>My unweighted GPA will be around a 3.88 counting freshman year. But if you don't count freshman year, it's like a 3.78.</p>
<p>Which one will colleges take?</p>
<p>Colleges dont necessarily “take” a specific GPA, because after all your GPA will appear on your transcript. </p>
<p>Some notable schools (Princeton) discount your freshmen grades if they recalculate your GPA, but a majority of them do not.</p>
<p>More importantly, all colleges look at your transcript, not your GPA. They want to see what courses you took and what difficulty they were; they want to see you challenging yourself.</p>
<p>Stanford, Princeton, and the UC schools will recalculate your GPA without freshman grades; however, these grades can still count indirectly, as they determine your ranking within a graduating class.</p>
<p>this varies so much from one school to another that you really have to tell us what schools you will apply to. some recalculate based on their own weighted or unweighted system, some look mostly at your weighted or unweighted as it appears on your transcript, some do one of those but also look very favorably on year over year improvement, and some aren’t public about their methodology and will only say something vague like they ‘consider your grades in the context of the rigor of your curriculum’</p>
<p>Is a 3.8 unweighted GPA too low for top schools?</p>
<p>Yes they obviously look at your total GPA, otherwise they wouldn’t ask you to put it on the commonApp</p>
<p>Yes - colleges look at your overall unweighted gpa, including freshman year. (Some colleges look at the weighted also and some recalculate it according to their own formula.) Get the best grades you can taking the toughest courses you can. They like to see an upward trend, so doing well in your junior year and the first semester of your senior year can make up for some weaknesses in freshman year.</p>