I’m a freshman at a incredibly competitive highschool. Quarter 1 is ending in 3 days and my grades are the worst it’s been my entire life. I’m trying to aim for a higher levels colleges like for example Univeristy of Chicago. But is that over with my grades?
Here’s my grades:
Spanish 1: 94
Orchestra(honors): 97
Magnet Civil/culture: civics/economics(honors): 96
Magnet Civil/culture: English 1(honors): 99
Biology(honors): 93
Math 3(honors): 85
AP human geography: 80
Chemistry(honors): 74
I’m confident I can raise math to a 90 and above after quarter two so right now that’s not my main concern. My chemistry grades are going up but it will not be a B by the end of the quarter. I’m sure I can’t get in any of the colleges I want with a C in one of my quarters. This is the first time in my life I got anything less than a B as my final grade. If I ace every other quarter from now do you think I can get in a good college? I wanted ivy but that’s out of question now.
Ivy leagues are not out of the question, freshman year is given very little weight. Colleges only see your semester grades not your quarter grades, so you can bring it up. Get extra help in chemistry if you’re having difficulty, better to do it now rather than later. You still have 3 more quarters to get those grades averaged out to an A or A-, so don’t stress. Maybe you shouldn’t have doubled up on bio and chem, you don’t seem like you’re ready to do both. You took an AP and 6 honors classes freshman year, that was a big mistake. If you still can, I’d advise you to drop chemistry and just take it next year, better to be on the normal track getting A’s than getting C’s in the advanced one! Good Luck.
These grades are hardly horrible. Chemistry is your weakest (& a lot of students)…spend more time & energy on it. And try to gain some perspective otherwise you will be a basket case by Jr year!
The bigger problem I see is being hung up on college prestige as I high school freshman. You should be figuring out what you like and what your strengths are, asking with your limits. The right school will follow.
At my school, only STEM-dedicated freshmen who want to take many AP sciences over the course of HS dare to double up on Honors Bio and Honors Chem freshman year. I would go along with what @stanford200381 said and see if there’s any way for you to drop Chemistry and take it next year, because even on that track, you should be able to take 2 AP science courses (which is pretty competitive).
Also, if your school submits semester grades, you have another quarter to make up for whatever you missed this quarter. Say, if you got a 74 in Chemistry as your Q1 grade, you could get an 86 for Q2 and still walk out with a B, not counting midterm exams.
Ivy Leagues are definitely not out of the question. Freshman year is given little weight as said above (though you should still try to get good grades of course). You’re also taking a lot of classes. Is it normal at your school to take that many?
I’m especially not sure why you’re taking bio and chem at the same time. I think I’d consider dropping chem.
I agree with others that these grades are not horrible, and that Freshman year is far less important than all following years. However, I hope that this will be a lesson to you that there is a limit to what any one human can do, and it is not always a good idea to get yourself into the most difficult classes that anyone will let you take. This might also help you learn something about how to deal with very difficult classes, since it looks very much like you should try to seek out extra help in your Chemistry class. You might also want to think about whether to get extra help in Math since so much of what you are going to learn in future years of Math will depend upon what you are learning now.
At some point, probably not for a couple of years, you might want to think about the fact that the University of Chicago is one of the toughest universities in the country (although MIT and Caltech are probably at least as hard), and you have to consider whether it is really where you want to go. Fortunately you don’t have to think about this until after you have your final grades for the first three years of high school.