<p>I have heard it 3 different ways. A) They look at your semester scores ie. {ENTER CLASS HERE}Part A and {SAME CLASS HERE}Part B. I have also heard it as B) The overall grade of the year for {ENTER CLASS HERE}. and Finaly C) They look at your GPA and the classes you took. How do they look at your scores? Because I had one C in Honors Spanish II the first semester but a High B in the second semester. Thanks</p>
<p>I think they look at both semester grades instead of one grade for the class overall.</p>
<p>Not all high schools put semester grades on the transcript. (Mine doesn’t, for example.) They will work with whatever information they’re given.</p>
<p>At the end of the day it doesn’t matter… your gpa is the most important because it is the one thing that all students have on their transcript. It is the factor that distinguishes one student from another.</p>
<p>I agree with glassesarechic. High schools don’t all give the same information, so colleges can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach. (My kids’ school doesn’t list semester grades on the transcript, either. Just courses and final course grades.)</p>
<p>I think bsmd11’s claim that “your GPA is the most important” is oversimplified. Schools don’t all calculate GPA the same way. Some schools use + and -; others don’t. Some schools report weighted GPA; some report unwieghted; some report both. Schools that weight honors or AP classes don’t all weight them the same way. GPAs are not easily comparable from school to school.</p>
<p>Colleges–even large public universities–will look closely at your *transcript<a href=“not%20just%20your%20GPA”>/I</a>, together with your secondary school report and your school profile. These three documents together give a lot of information about your accomplishments, the kinds of academic challenges you have attempted, and the environment in which you’ve been doing the work they’re evaluating.</p>
<p>There are over 2600 accredited four-year colleges and universities in the U.S., plus community colleges; there are over 36,000 accredited high schools. Most of time somebody tells you, “Colleges do X,” he or she is probably oversimplifying. (NOTE: this advice surely applies to the advice in my own last paragraph.) Not all colleges do the same things, and not all high schools report things the same way.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure adcoms use their eyes to look at grades</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I get what you’re saying, but colleges have a system to convert all gpa’s to a standard format that all students have (like the UC’s). So, yes, I still stand by the fact that the GPA is the most important factor. The number might be different from what your high school give you, but the colleges will recalculate it to standardize everyone.</p>
<p>^ Sadly GPA still isn’t standard. You’ll have some schools, or some teachers, that give out easy A’s. Others hardly give out A’s at all. And then there’s the matter of taking APES vs. AP Bio and that sort of thing.</p>
<p>Well, yes that’s true. But it is as standardized as it can get. High school rigor plays some role when colleges look at the gpa.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Some will recalculate it, and some won’t. Dartmouth, for example, will not. According to the dean of admissions at Dartmouth, they feel quite confident that they can evaluate an applicant’s academic record using the transcript, secondary school report and school profile, without taking the trouble to recalculate his or her grade point average.</p>