<p>I just calculated what my cumulative GPA will be after this summer and I feel so stupid.</p>
<p>I ended freshman year with a 3.86 (4.0 is 96+ in every class) and a 4.75/5.0 near #1. </p>
<p>Well, sophomore year I failed a class and made a D in another. I also made 2 B's and 3 A's. This summer I'm taking 2 honors classes (99 in one, 100 in the other). After this summer my GPA is only going to be a 3.43 and a 4.375. My school screwed up my transcript last year and I ended up with an incorrect 4.375 and that put me at #5 (top 6%) but the eventually fixed it. Now I'm going to end up with a 4.375 starting next year with only 3 semesters left. The average GPA at my state's flagship is a 4.4 and almost everyone's in the top 10% with 2000+ SAT scores.</p>
<p>So in the end, my rank is going to be OK and my weighted GPA is going to be decent (not outstanding) but I'm worried that the 2 blips sophomore year are going to screw me everywhere. I have a decent excuse but I don't think colleges care and my counselor is inexperienced and I doubt she will make any comment about it. My maximum GPA is now something like a 3.69/4.68.</p>
<p>Any advice... "Wow.. you suck!" or other comments?</p>
<p>Don’t feel bad, if universities took all of my classes in highschool and used that, I would seriously fail at life. Good thing they only look at your top six courses in your senior year ! =) wanna move to canada? ;)</p>
<p>how could you have gotten a D and a f, and 2 B’s and ended with that good of a GPA? honestly your GPA is fine… really, but if you’re still worried about it, talk to your counsler and see if they can scratch the class/ grade. Or talk to your old teachers and see if you can talk them into changing it, be persuassive and such.</p>
<p>you are a ****er you think you fail with a 3.4 cumulative? Shut up. what you need to do is go outside and get a life. watch a baseball game. go to lunch with your friends. have a life you toolbag</p>
<p>The counselor won’t do anything about it and neither would the teachers. It isn’t like most of CCer’s schools where they’ll change your grades to make you feel better. I signed up for AP Calculus BC and AP Physics B online as we don’t have any APs in my school. I hadn’t taken AP Calculus AB or a previous Physics Class and we only got the first 2 weeks to drop, in which we did absolutely nothing. Then I realized what shape I was in. In Calculus we got a very small textbook that contained the formal mathematical definition of an equation and homework. We got only “modules” that had become completely screwed up so they were no help, we had a video on 1/4 of the concepts which covered the basics and then our all of our assessments had the hardest problems the teacher could come up with. The original person who made the course had moved on and so no one could fix it. Then they changed the grading scale to make it a lot tougher without converting grades. So I’m sitting here with no way to actually learn calculus, the math teachers at my school tell me they don’t know calculus (WHAT?) and there’s no one else to help me. I can’t drop so there’s really nothing I could do but teach myself… sorry if I’m not smart enough to just reinvent calculus. Worse still, I sent the wrong file for the final project and was away on a church conference and grades had already been submitted.</p>
<p>Physics was worse. Way worse. We seemed like we would actually be doing stuff and the work wasn’t that hard until after the drop date. There were no online lessons. You were supposed to learn everything out of the book. Our labs required equipment my school said we had but didn’t work and other than that we had problem sets and quizzes. Instead of actually teaching you physics… we were given some of the equations for the unit and expected to magically derive some other random equation we’ve never heard of and not even in the syllabus for AP Physics and then come to some epiphany about it. Only about 20% of our questions seemed to be actually AP level, everything else was higher. My teachers couldn’t help me so I got another physics textbook, which was no help, then I attended physics class at a local college before school that were supposedly at the same level and met with the physics professor after school. I still didn’t understand physics and the class was “orders of magnitude” easier than our AP Physics class.</p>
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<p>I wanted to go to science and math and I didn’t get in because of the above courses. And honestly, if NCSSM is like the above courses (they were made by NCSSM) then I wouldn’t want to go. I’m not all worried about the top 20. But if I don’t make Top 10 in my school, I have almost no chance at my state flagship. We have slightly over 80 students now, at least 20 are going to opt for a 5th year. That means that while you may have a great rank, the percentage isn’t wonderful.</p>
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You should have read down further. And I only ended up with 6 credits this year out of the 8 we’re supposed to be getting. So when adcoms look at my transcript, there’s going to be a short list of a lot of bad grades… and my AP classes get repeated twice with 0.5 credits each listing so it’s going to look even worse.</p>
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<p>I don’t mean to put down people with sub-3.5 grades… but what really ticks me off is that other people in my class are all taking extremely easy classes and they get high grades until a standardized final comes around and gives them a 70 as 25% of what they formally had as a 97. Then they take some incredibly easy college class and have a C and get to drop it mid semester. They think I’m so smart at my school but apparently I’m not. At least I can say I finally understand what it feels like for a normal kid to take an honors class, try all they can, and still not do well.</p>
While this certainly makes things harder, it is worth keeping in mind that this is a very valuable skill to learn. Even in a normal classroom setting, particularly a lecture course in college, you’ll find some teachers with whom you just don’t mesh. You can’t learn from their teaching style. In these cases, being able to teach yourself the material from the textbook is very useful, as it may save some grades. Although one is generally not expected to learn such a skill in high school, it can save time in college (where students sometimes struggle in the first year because they’re unprepared for such eventualities).</p>
<p>While this probably is not the answer you want to hear, keep these things in mind. It’s over, and you can’t do anything about it. What you can do is focus on the rest of your time in high school. Show colleges that it was an aberration. Learn from it - what does this say about you, your limits, your strengths, and your weaknesses? Failure is inherently a part of life, regardless of what some of the posts on these forums may have one think. When one thinks about it, from which experience does one learn more? Doing poorly in a class and seeing where one needs more work, or coasting through an easy class because there’s no challenge involved? And finally, remember that after being accepted to college, your high school grades won’t matter.</p>
<p>I wish you luck in the remainder of your studies and hope that, if nothing else, you can learn from the experience, which will put you at an advantage over those students who are taking “extremely easy classes,” regardless of what happens with college.</p>
I signed up for AP Calculus BC and AP Physics B online as we don’t have any APs in my school. I hadn’t taken AP Calculus AB or a previous Physics Class and we only got the first 2 weeks to drop, in which we did absolutely nothing. Then I realized what shape I was in. In Calculus we got a very small textbook that contained the formal mathematical definition of an equation and homework. We got only “modules” that had become completely screwed up so they were no help, we had a video on 1/4 of the concepts which covered the basics and then our all of our assessments had the hardest problems the teacher could come up with. The original person who made the course had moved on and so no one could fix it. Then they changed the grading scale to make it a lot tougher without converting grades. So I’m sitting here with no way to actually learn calculus, the math teachers at my school tell me they don’t know calculus (WHAT?) and there’s no one else to help me. I can’t drop so there’s really nothing I could do but teach myself… sorry if I’m not smart enough to just reinvent calculus. Worse still, I sent the wrong file for the final project and was away on a church conference and grades had already been submitted.</p>