<p>In a hypothetical situation, what if someone had mediocre grades freshmen year and maybe 1-2 B's sophomore year, but did really well junior and senior years - all As. On the transcript, the term GPAs increases steadily from lower 3.0s to upper 3.0s and eventually reaching the plateau of 4.0 by sophomore/junior year and never wavering after that.</p>
<p>Without lecturing about how hard it would be to complete terms with 4.0s as an upperclassmen, can someone explain how the upward trend would look?</p>
<p>I've been told by a representative at my college that scholarships and internships don't look at your specific grades, they look only at the overall GPA. I just want to confirm that here. I know for sure, though, that grad schools look at your records extensively.</p>
<p>You could write about it in your personal statement to draw emphasis to it. But I’m not too sure if they evaluate it and arrive at the conclusions that you’re hoping for. You have to bring it to their attention that there was something you weren’t doing right and you turned it around for the better. This is what I would assume.</p>
<p>Depending on what you are applying for, I think a lot of organizations are not going to take the time to investigate your whole transcript when they have people with better GPAs to consider.</p>
<p>Depends on the internship. For two of the internships I interviewed for, one in finance and one in marketing, my interviewer looked through my transcript, specifically at my math and econ grades, and asked how comfortable I am with numbers, statistical analysis, financial models and so on.</p>
<p>An upward trend will show that you’re maturing, which is good.</p>
<p>GPA is important because it’s a quantitative way to compare two people. It’s not the only thing a company or graduate school looks at. </p>
<p>In most cases GPA is used as an easy way to eliminate a large set of applicants (ie - we have 1000 resumes, 250 have a GPA below X.X, lets eliminate those and deal with the other 750). In other words, not having it hurts but having it doesn’t necessarily help. BTW - I’m saying this as a reality not because I think it’s a good way to find the top applicant.</p>
<p>Some grad schools look at the transcript. They want to see how you performed in core classes and some look for the trends you’re talking about.</p>
<p>I think its pretty obvious that in some cases, freshmen will not be scoring as high as they possibly can. Freshmen may not pick the correct majors, understand what is expected in college or have trouble adjusting to new environments. </p>
<p>I think overall GPA is relative. For example - An engineer scores VERY highly in his first two years of undergrad study, acing classes like Diff Eq. and Physics II, where some people struggle and are weeded out, but fails to perform as well when he moves up to engineering classes, but ends up with a 3.5, an extremely good GPA for an engineer.</p>
<p>In contrast, if an engineer comes in completely blank and uninformed about what to do does ok his first two years, but then learns and does very well his last two years, ending up with a 3.5, I think that this case would warrant more desire to an employer and the first scenario since the actual engineering classes are what an engineer plans for and more applicable to an engineering company.</p>
<p>I kind of view GPA like stocks, its not the overall that matters, but how the company begins to perform as of late - learning from mistakes and increasing efficiency. Thats just my opinion and I am sure many people will disagree.</p>