Plainly put, I was dumb and care about colleges during my freshman year. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to do after high school and planned on attending some in state college that all my friends went to, and my carelessness led to several B’s which killed my GPA. However, around my junior year, I grew ambitious and wanted to try to get into a top school such as an Ivy. Since then, I’ve worked hard to improve my GPA and only have made 1 B. I’ve also explained this to colleges in my application. Will they consider the fact that I realized my mistakes and tried my best to improve once I did? Also, I’ll be graduating in the top 10% of my class; (I probably would have been in the same percentile even if I made all A’s due to our competive Class of 2015)
It depends on the school. Anyway, having an upward trend is good. If you want to get into Ivies, it is tough no matter what.
Right, I know that for Ivies even if I had a 4.0, the chances are still low considering their acceptance rates are usually single digits. But I was wondering that if my chances are still decent for schools such as Berkeley, Urbana, and GA Tech.
Upward trends definitely help. Colleges tend to put less weight on freshman grades than other years, though your class rank will still take a hit. I believe some colleges don’t even include freshman grades in their GPA recalculations (can’t name any specifically off the top of my head)
If my freshman grades don’t count, then I’ve only made 2 B’s. Also, would they look at what subjects I made a B in? Because 1 happens to be in Biology, which is not related to my intended major and one is in Visual Arts (drawing)
The UCs don’t include freshman grades.
OP, I hope you are looking at the costs for those schools. For instance UCB is $50K/year OOS.
What’s your parents’ budget?
(Keep in mind that you can “only” borrow $5,500 for freshman year, so unless you intend to get your parents into debt, you need to know how much your parents can pay out of pocket).
What’s your actual GPA? SAT/ACT/Subject scores? Rigor (how many APs?)
Can you list the colleges to which you applied?