Do selective colleges care about minus and plus grades?

Do colleges care how high your A’s are? An example would be a 93 versus a 98, or a 97 versus a 99. Thanks!

adcoms don’t come out of a machine as identical copies, so probably some care and some don’t. How much? Impossible to measure.

However what selective colleges are doing is looking at your app; your essays, ECs, what your teachers say about you, etc. These outweigh whether your grades have a + or - tick after a few of them.

Well, those +/ - grades change your gpa, and they do care about gpa

@twoinanddone I think that AOs translate all grades to a standardized system.

Otherwise, it is difficult to compare GPAs. For example, Jimmy got 92, 83, 90, and 91. His GPA is 89, or a B/B+. However, in Sam’s school, those are given as letter grades, so they are A, B, A, and A. His GPA is 3.75, or an A-/A.

Depends on the college. At top colleges, any A is an A. They look at the transcript, not simply gpa.

But a slew of the lowest qualified A grades at that hs (the bar at 93, 92 or 90,) might be noted as “low A’s.”

First semester of 9th is too early to worry.

Anecdotal evidence (take it for whatever you think it is worth) at my son’s former HS (ranked #1 public HS in US by WSJ a while back) indicates big differences even at “top” colleges.

For example, Naviance showed very, very clear differences in admission success at Harvard and Yale between GPAs <96.49 and >96.50 (when combined with SAT over 2300/2400) where >96.50 had at least 3X the success rate.

That wasn’t the case at Princeton where anything below 95.00 had virtually no chance (unless recruited athlete) and everything above 95.01 had about the same chances.