Hello everyone,
My high school GPA was fairly high freshman year, dropped sophomore year, but then picked back up into an upward trend and got it back to a 4.0. Obviously colleges would prefer a consistently high GPA, but how would my situation look to admissions officers? My case seems to be a bit unusual, as most students tend to mess up their freshman year and then work harder from there. Here are my stats (weighted/unweighted):
Fresh Sem 1: 4.33/4.0
Fresh Sem 2: 4.33/4.0
Soph Sem 1: 4.14/3.43
Soph Sem 2: 4.38/3.75
Junior Sem 1: 4.57/3.86
Junior Sem 2: 4.71/4.0
What do you think? I’m looking at elite schools, and Northwestern is my dream school.
Thanks
The exact same thing happened to me. Almost the exact same numbers, etc. AOs look at freshman year as: a warm up period where kids can mess up, or a year that was too easy, so the next year usually catches them off guard. I wouldn’t worry about it. You seem like a solid kid. As long as you have other things about you that are interesting, you should be fine.
Upward trend is good. You had a slight dip as I see it and recovered. But who knows about chances about Northwestern because it depends on the application pool.
I don’t see much of a downward trend. It looks like you took a more challenging schedule sophomore year and you stumbled a bit in the fall, adjusting to the increased rigor. You caught yourself fairly early and then you did better your second half of sophomore year. You increased rigor again your junior year but this time you were ready.
Northwestern will be a reach simply because it has an extremely low acceptance rate, not because of your grades. You’re doing fine in terms of your GPA.