<p>When selective colleges calculate unweighted GPA, do they
include all three years of high school classes, PE and all?
What about junior high classes such as foreign language
and Algebra?</p>
<p>Specifically, I'd like to know how Dartmouth, Brown, USC,
and Carnegie Mellon look at GPA's. How much will a C in
Algebra 2 in Freshman year hurt me?</p>
<p>My grades are better in Soph and Junior years and I have
some AP classes, so my UC GPA is > 4.0 but my unweighted
High school GPA is more like 3.6. I'd like to apply to some
private colleges rather than stick to the UC's.</p>
<p>I don’t know for sure about the colleges you mentioned, but generally PE and that sort of thing would not be factored in. Foreign language would be, but not your junior high classes – only high school. It will be 9-12 grade that they’ll look at. (Why would junior high grades even be on your high school transcript? Some schools do that, but hopefully yours is not one of them.)</p>
<p>As to how a C in your freshman year will affect things… that just depends on the college and on the rest of your application. If you’re going to have a weaker grade, earlier is better than later. An upward trend is a good thing. However, if your application is similar to other students, except they got the A in that freshman class, then what is it about your application that would incline them to accept you over that other student?</p>
<p>It could be a number of things, but when you’re looking at very selective schools (especially Brown and Dartmouth from your list), you know for sure you’re in a big pool of exceedingly outstanding applicants.</p>
<p>^^Many schools put junior hs grades on the hs transcript if they were for hs courses and you received hs credit. My son took Spanish I and Honors Algebra I in eighth grade…both were hs courses and he did receive credit and are on his hs transcript. However, I have heard that some schools don’t look at freshman year courses (or at least don’t consider the grades).</p>
<p>Remember that people aren’t admitted on the basis of grades alone, so if you have other strengths than you could easily be admitted over someone who has no C, but does not have other strengths. Of course, there are probably a zillion people out there with perfect grades, test scores, and amazing EC’s (sorry, but that’s how competitive it has become).</p>