<p>This fall I am going to be applying to some PhD programs with early December application deadlines. I remember sending fall semester grades later when applying to undergrad schools. Do you do the same in grad school or do they just look at the first three years of undergrad?
Thanks!</p>
<p>In general, fall semester grades do not matter if you apply the fall of your senior year, provided that you pass the courses you need for your degree. They do matter if you decide to apply again at a later time.</p>
<p>I disagree. If you submit a mid-year report sufficiently early, they can make a difference. Princeton asks for them as soon as you get them so I imagine they look at them (and honestly, I don’t think I would have gotten in to Princeton and Stanford without my fall semester grades).</p>
<p>None of the programs I applied for in Electrical engineering and materials science required a midyear report, or even had a mechanism for reporting Fall grades. You should check if the program requires one. If it does it probably matters; if not it probably doesn’t.</p>
<p>If it gives you a GPA boost then maybe you should tactfully ask them if they’d like them…in my case my GPA went down a bit my last fall semester (and I knew it would prior to getting final grades), so I sent transcripts out beforehand. :D</p>
<p>I applied to 14 PhD programs, and 2 of them asked for fall semester grades to be submitted as soon as they were available.</p>