<p>Early in my childhood I was abused in multiple ways by a trusted authority figure from ages 3-6.
It didn't really begin to bother me until I was about 10, which follows a trend in which my grades begin to drop.
As soon as I hit Middle School, my grades dropped incredibly low and averaged around areas like 2.5 and so due.
As I got older, and with psychological counseling, I was able to overcome the issues at the start of my sophomore year. With psychological counseling, my grades continued to improve from the 2.5-2.9 average of Middle School .
I got out of freshman year with a 3.3.
Now at the start of sophomore year I got a lung infection that took me out for nearly two weeks and required a visit to the hospital.
I came back during finals week, and because of this I had very little time to catch up on what I had missed.
For example, my Algebra class had covered two chapters while I was gone, English class had read the entirety of a novel and German class had gone through three chapters.
Most of the teachers were pretty unhelpful and expected me to do my two weeks of work in the three days before grades were due.
To spare you of more complaining, I ended up with a 3.7 for sophomore year (my grades so far support this trend).
So, my cumulative GPA is sitting somewhere around 3.4-3.5 and my weighted gpa is in 4.7-4.8 zone.
Is there anyway I can give an explanation of my scenario to admissions so they don't think I'm some lazy deadbeat?
When it comes to practice tests, my ACT range from 30-33 and I got a 1850 on the PSAT (Looks like ACT for me) and my SAT II's for Physics and Math I hover around the 800 mark. </p>
<p>In your admissions essay, maybe you can put a focus on the struggles that you went through during, and even before your high school career. That way you could show maybe how you grew from it, and gave you determination to achieve higher in the future, but also give a subtle reasoning as to why your grades didn’t turn out as well as they could of. If you can pull it off, it might help.</p>
<p>Usually, this would be something for your GC to include in your rec. You could also use it as the topic for your essay</p>
<p>@guineagirl96 The only problem with that is I don’t feel comfortably telling my GC about this, well what happened to me as a child.
Is there anyway I can minimize any mention of it?
Just talking about it now makes me shudder. </p>
<p>You don’t have to give specific details, just something along the lines of i was abused as a child. What your GC would really comment on is the fact that you went through counseling, which improved your grades. They would also comment on your illness and how the hospitalization affected your grades.</p>
<p>So how much of a boost would that give to my gpa? Would it be treated as slightly higher, as my gpa now is pretty high in comparison to freshman year.</p>
<p>Your GPA is not as bad as you think if you can continue your upward trend, and the weighted GPA shows you take hard classes. Unless you are going Ivy, you should have a shot at most schools. I was in a similar situation in terms of GPA on paper (Weighted GPA’s: 3.33, 3.67, 3.9?, 4.81 Semester 1 Senior Year). I’m not sure how your school weights as it is over a 1 point difference, but it still implies you have taken a difficult schedule I would assume.</p>
<p>Hard classes + decent GPA + upward trend + good test scores (if you land 30-33 on the ACT) will get you into plenty of great schools.</p>