<p>I think B+'s are great. While I do feel a slight disappointment that it wasn't an A- or A, I think getting B+'s are commendable, especially in Honors or AP classes.</p>
<p>Then I come here. EVERYBODY tells me that B+'s destroy your chances at getting into top colleges. WUSTL? Out. NYU? Out. Rice? Nahhh. USC? Ehh, try again. </p>
<p>Literally, people are telling me, "Local public school is your answer."</p>
<p>I have a 3.3 GPA. Straight B+'s. I don't understand! There's barely a difference between B+ and A-, yet people tell me that if you get A-'s, you can be in the contention for top 25 schools, but not if you have B+'s!</p>
<p>I am sorely confused. Can somebody explain this to me?</p>
<p>You just have to keep in mind that, when you’re applying to top schools, you’re competing against brilliant people that have A’s and A+'s across the board. Are B+'s bad? Of course not! But will they be looked as favorably as A-'s? Probably not. It’s all about supply and demand, and so long that 30,000 people are applying to top schools (that statistic is for Brown, this year, I believe), you just have to keep in mind that every grade counts, and should be as high as you can get it.</p>
<p>Dude, I wish I could rewind to freshman year of high school and have someone smack me in the face and tell me that A-'s aren’t enough. I went into the college process thinking my 3.7 would impress adcoms, and now I realize it’s a hindrance to my application. Sadly, B+ aren’t going to really get you in to those places you listed. That’s just the truth. Sorry man.</p>
<p>I think it depends on your high school- some have grade inflation, some don’t. </p>
<p>At many public schools (save a few magnet/exceptions) there’s huuuge grade inflation. And many people in your class will have As. An A vs. A- will make a life-and-death difference. It’ll be easier to get an A than at, lets say a prestigious private school where only 15% of the class has As, and the rest are lower. </p>
<p>If you know your school does not inflate grades, than a B+ is stellar. And colleges who see your school’s info report will know that.</p>
<p>But since the majority of students in the US go to public schools, you’ll often hear that a B+ is terrible.</p>
<p>I hope I explained this alright…haha sorry if I was confusing :P</p>
<p>I attend a private school as well. Average SAT score of 1950, average GPA of 3.3, sends the top third of the class to top 20 schools. I take the hardest courses available. The problem, I suppose, is finding colleges that recognize the rigor of your coursework. I applied early to Williams, and was very surprised to find myself deferred. After glancing over my school’s naviance, I realized that Williams gets a surprisingly small number of applicants from my school, meaning they had no context in which to place my 3.7. Comparable schools such as Middlebury and Bowdoin, who recieve 5-10 applicants per year from my school, were much more forgiving to the 3.6-3.7 crowd at my school. Nevertheless, Ivies recquire 3.9’s or some other significant hook no matter where you go to high school.</p>
<p>Beautifulnight - that was a very good explanation, thank you! Mine doesn’t have grade inflation and I was honestly shocked to hear that B+ was bad, but now I realize why. I do hope that my school report reflects it!</p>
<p>Drought - my school is almost exactly like yours, only public. More than half of the kids in my honors math class are failing, while I’m scraping by with a C+ which is literally fantastic. It honestly bothers me when people tell me “B+ is terrible.”</p>
<p>Truly unfair, it seems to me.</p>
<p>If you’re not going to get a 4.0, why bother go to the hard school if the top colleges don’t recognize that you really just might better than that 3.8 kid from a bleh high school.</p>
<p>I’m actually making some real nice grades this year (okay, probably not by CC standards. They’re mostly A-'s. Literally top of the class.) and yet I realize that because of the seemingly “lowness” of it, it really doesn’t matter. </p>
<p>I understand the Ivy thing, though. Perfectly reasonable. I was shocked to hear that even NYU and USC were out of reach, to be honest.</p>
<p>It’s not just the grades- what else do you do? If all you do is study (no sports,no ECs,no arts, no job), then probably B’s are NOT enough. If you do other things, and do them well, then that actually would put you past someone with all As who only studied all the time.</p>
<p>“To be honest, it makes me wonder if people who keep saying “to be honest” are actually being honest when they’re not saying “to be honest.””
HAHA, win.</p>
<p>I go to a crappy public school. Out of 491 kids in my class, the top 30% have averages that are an A. I’m ranked 6th, and I have a 102.3. My friend, who is 24th, has a 98.8. A’s here are nothing special.</p>
<p>The science academy down the street probably doesn’t have any students who get A’s. That’s an actual accomplishment there. Here, it’s expected.</p>
<p>I think that there should be no letter grades, just strict numerical grades. I mean come on, a 92.5 should not equal a 96.49 and an 89.5 should not look different from an 89.49.</p>
<p>B+'s are only a detriment if you go to a crappy school OR if you apply to a school that is extremely stats driven…</p>
<p>For example, like thisgirllisaG, our NJ public has a 3.7 UW GPA for only the top 5-7% of kids; a B+ in honors/AP is kind of hard to get and A’s are, as you say, very hard to achieve…
but the problem is at colleges like UMich, who used to use unweighted GPA’s for admission as gospel, only the tippy top kids were admitted in the past (they changed their policy as of this year, are looking at weighted GPA’s now, so that has changed)</p>
<p>CC posters are always flying around flagging 4.0 UW and 19.5 Ws; colleges are aware that different schools grade differently</p>
<p>Do not assume grades to be nominal: a 4.0 might be worth less than a 3.5 in some situations. Or, in your case, 3.5 vs 3.3.</p>
<p>Dont quote me on this as I’m not authorized to make this statement:</p>
<p>Very often, colleges do not look at your grade in a class (unless it’s a glaring C or D–C’s and D’s are universally emblematic of subpar performance). By extension, your GPA, as an average, has even less importance placed upon it. In the most simplest terms possible, If I had an A+ and 2 A-'s, does it make me less qualified than some other student, who goes to a different school that grades differently and gives him an A+, an A, and an A-? Of course not.</p>
<p>Rather, they stress “rigor of courseload.”
Even that is subjective: some secondary high schools’ AP courses are less ‘rigorous’ than their equivalent Honors and/or regular courses at other schools.</p>
<p>Not saying that it is always the case or APs are ever easy; just throwing it out there.</p>
<p>Its really about the curriculum at your own school. Try to find out where you are in the graduating class and use naviance if you have access to it. Having just gone through this last year with my D, antonioray above hit the nail on the head. Pretty much how naviance predicted my D’s outcome is how it came out! (BTW she is very happy in her first choice college and made the decision based on the predictions made by the naviance program) Good luck!</p>
<p>I heard something about silver medal winners being more unhappy than gold medal winners on NPR today. I think it was study done by Northwestern researchers. </p>