I have the lowest GPA out of all of my close friends and I feel super bad about myself. One of them was telling a story about how this guy said his GPA out loud in the car and he was like “oh…” and he laughed about how bad his GPA is. When we asked what the boy’s GPA was he goes, “3.9”. I have a 3.97. Yet, according to this friend a bad GPA is anything below a 4.1. My other friend said he was being too harsh and that anything below a 4.0 is bad. They all have above 4.3s. I feel so dumb.
Sounds like a very immature crowd. Please don’t get caught up in this. Not everyone can have a perfect GPA. There is nothing wrong with a 3.97 GPA.
What grade are you in? What difficulty of classes are you taking? You do you and don’t pay any attention to them.
@kakiyoung the question is not ‘how many "A"s did you get’, but rather ‘how much did you learn’? If you learned a lot along the way, it was a huge success! If you did not learn, or did not work hard, but learned a lesson on how hard you want to work in the future, that, too, is a success. When you have time, I would suggest reading Carole Dwick’s “Growth Mindset” - it was required reading for all of my children and will illustrate how useless a GPA is in and of itself. Grades provide a metric for comparison, but growth, resilience and hard work are the true predictors of happiness and success … not grades!
These are your friends???
Lol. You have miles to go to understand what top colleges look for. Your choice whether to rely on pronouncements from other hs kids or do your own informed research.
You can lose a lot of ground relying on these kids for your info and self esteem. Not the wise choice.
So, I find it hard to take this seriously.
Sophomore in High School.
Yep 
@kakiyoung Keep in mind that colleges recompute GPAs internally to make them more consistent from school to school. They receive info from each applicant’s high school that helps them determine the rigor of courses the kids are taking. My son (who has “only” a 3.76uw/4.04 wt GPA) always jokes that if he were at the local public school he’d have a 4.8 like all his friends who go there (seems like EVERYONE has above a 4.0). And yet, his school sends more than half the class to top 50 schools, including his brother who had a 3.99wGPA to Cornell… So don’t worry about the difference between a 3.97 & 4.0 – it’s aesthetic, at most.