<p>Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find this anywhere on Princeton’s website, but I’ve heard a million times on here (for example, in [this</a> thread](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/645972-does-princeton-count-freshman-year-grades.html]this”>Does princeton count freshman year grades? - Princeton University - College Confidential Forums) and [this</a> thread](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/princeton-university/703859-princeton-freshman-grades.html]this”>Princeton Freshman Grades - Princeton University - College Confidential Forums)) that Princeton doesn’t use freshman-year grades when they’re calculating your GPA. You can learn more about Princeton’s admission process [url=<a href=“https://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/faq/reviewing_the_application/#comp000046cc511c0000000dab18e5]here[/url”>https://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/faq/reviewing_the_application/#comp000046cc511c0000000dab18e5]here[/url</a>]. They do consider your class rank, and freshman-year grades have an effect on that. </p>
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Top colleges look at your transcript with your individual grades, not any numerical GPA (because all high schools weight grades differently). Some colleges recalculate an unweighted GPA so they can compare everyone on the same scale.</p>
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What does that mean? Knowing grammar is very important for good writing (but native speakers learn a lot of their English grammar outside of school, and if you’re a native speaker you’ve probably developed some intuition about what “sounds right” even if you never learned it formally). </p>
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Are her rules really as superficial as you think they are? I mean, I can see taking off points for not having quotes from credible sources. I also don’t think length and vocabulary have much to do with anything, except that your paper should be long enough to cover the topic adequately and the words you use shouldn’t be bigger than necessary.
The kind of writing that gets praised in middle school is usually pretentious and lacking in substance. Most middle-school kids can barely write a coherent sentence at all, so teachers tend to reward kids who use big words and write way more than necessary. But you’re in high school now, and your teachers are criticizing you and expecting more from you so that your writing will continue to improve.</p>
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Probably not any more or less of a chance than you would have had if your English grade was slightly better. It’s Princeton, so pretty much everyone gets rejected. Agonizing over stupid little things isn’t really going to increase your chances of acceptance, so there’s no point in doing it. </p>
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This isn’t a good mindset to have either. Colleges don’t reject people because they think they’re dumb; they reject people because the other candidates were marginally better at the time of application. If a college rejects you and you go on to be successful in life, that doesn’t mean they made a mistake in rejecting you. A rejection letter is not a haha-we-think-you’re-screwed letter. The fact that you applied at all indicates you’ll probably be fine in life, and they know that. </p>