<p>I know that colleges look at your overall senior year grades to make sure you didn't slack, but for the actual college application I will be sending, how important is the first semester of senior year? Is that calculated into my GPA when I send my applications out?</p>
<p>It's not calculated into your cumulative GPA, but it's reflective of your most, most recent work.</p>
<p>So, you had better do well.</p>
<p>I know my senior year performance helped me get off the waitlist, so do try your best.</p>
<p>Well, its not factored into your GPA that colleges will see when they first receive your transcript. For ED only the quarter grades matter, since usually thats all that they see, but for RD they will see your first semester grades. Basically you should try all the way through first semester senior year, and then you can probably slack off a little bit.</p>
<p>They mattered for the good schools.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>First <strong>term</strong> grades senior year seem to matter for H,P,M,S, Caltech
and Duke both EA and RD. High schools usually recalculate and update
the end of junior year gpa when sending in transcripts to colleges.</p>
<p>Second semester trend matters a lot if the applicant is eventually
on a waitlist.</p>
<p>I am convinced that my son's first semester senior grades were important in his admissions, as he had a discrepancy between his GPA (lowish) and his SATs (very high). His GC informed him of at least 1 adcom that called requesting an update on his senior grades. He aced an all AP senior schedule, proving that he could perform at ability level when motivated. We won't get into the slacker grades he received second semester, though...</p>
<p>They matter, sometimes a lot. They can confirm an upward trend in GPA for a student who started off slow in freshman year. They can verify consistency in a student who's done well all along. And they can be a danger signal in a student infected with "senioritis" whose performance falls in senior year. Any of these can affect the admissions decision, as well it should. A few schools (Michigan is one) have even been known to revoke offers of admission that have already been made on the basis of declining senior year grades, sometimes even second-semester grades. Moral: keep your nose to the grindstone.</p>
<p>People seem to think the emphasis is as follows:</p>
<ol>
<li>Junior Year </li>
<li>Sr. Year 1st semester</li>
<li>Sophomore Year</li>
<li>Freshman Year.</li>
</ol>
<p>If it were to be quantified, I'd say 50%/25%/20%/5%</p>