<p>I'm a senior in high school going off to college next year and my Greek teacher was having a conversation with my class about college GPA. Someone asked a question about how GPA's are calculated and he went off on a rant explaining it to us. But something he told us has been itching at me. He said that if you want to gurantee and maintain a high GPA throughout college, you MUST have a really high GPA freshman year because the more credits you pack on, the harder it becomes to raise it. He said if you screw up freshman year, it'll be harder to bring it up sophomore year. Is this true?
Say for example you end freshman year with a 2.7. Would it really be that difficult to bring that up to, say a 3.4 in sophomore year? If you don't do that well in freshman year are you basically screwed?</p>
<p>I might sound a bit ignorant or naive but I really don't know what to make of this because I feel like I have 10x the pressure now. I'm stressed out enough about college.</p>
<p>GPAs in college are not calculated any differently then they are in high school. Multiple the number of credits a class is worth times the grade, add it up for all classes, and divide by the total amount of credits.</p>
<p>It doesn’t get “more difficult” per se, it’s just marginal change is more different. Let’s say you get straight As your freshman year. You will have a 4.0. If you get all Cs freshman year, then all As sophomore year (assumig you take an IDENTICAL number of credits) you will only have a 3.0, because that freshman year is bringing it down. But same goes for reverse. If you get a 2.0 freshman year, then a 4.0 sophomore year, you will still bring it up an entire point, to a 3.0.</p>
<p>Yeah it would be hard to raise it from a 2.7 to a 3.4 sophomore year since getting straight As would put you at 3.35. You could get a 3.6 every year after and wind up with a 3.37.</p>
<p>That said, I’m not sure how “screwed” you would be. A 3.6+ is still good, and if anyone looks at your transcript and sees that you got a 2.7 during a year with intro/weeder classes and then excellent grades thereafter, they’ll know you’re not a moron.</p>
A bit of simple arithmetic: if you finish freshman year with a 2.7, you’ll need a perfect 4.0 in your sophomore year to end up with a cumulative GPA of 3.4.</p>
<p>If you have a 2.7 GPA in your first year, you would need:</p>
<ul>
<li>a 4.0 GPA in the remaining three years for a cumulative GPA of 3.7</li>
<li>a 3.5 GPA in the remaining three years for a cumulative GPA of 3.3</li>
<li>a 3.0 GPA in the remaining three years for a cumulative GPA of 2.8</li>
</ul>
<p>I told myself freshmen year, and every semester after that, that I would get 4.0 GPAs going forward, and I never did. My GPA is not terrible, but I have found it difficult to follow through on my commitments. Freshmen classes are cake. Knock those out with good grades and understand that the road gets tougher later on.</p>
<p>Others will disagree with me, but my perspective is that the higher you go, the deeper and more abstract classes become. Also, a lot of freshmen level classes are reiterations of high school - really basic stuff.</p>
<p>Do as well as you can your freshman year. Do you want to go into your sophomore year thinking “I need to bring my GPA up” or thinking “I can’t let my GPA drop too much”? Freshman year sets the stage for your future GPA. As b@r!um said, if you get a 2.7 your freshman year, the best GPA you can hope to graduate with is a 3.7 (assuming units taken are constant.)</p>
<p>Well what he said is true only in the sense that the higher your freshman GPA, the easier it will be to keep it up… but I got a 3.34 my first semester freshman year and by the end of my sophomore year, it will be a 3.7. Not bad, huh? I take 18 credits every semester, so that helps too.</p>
<p>Your teacher might have been trying to say something along the lines of “people who don’t succeed as freshmen have a hard time figuring out how to succeed as So/Jr/Sr, so you need to figure out how to succeed in that first year.” If this is what your teacher meant, then while that’s obviously not a subtle enough take on the issue, it’s also not a completely worthless one.</p>
<p>Obviously this stuff differs from institution to institution, but at my college there are a lot of institutional structures in place to help keep track of the progress that freshmen are making in their courses–this institutional framework is designed to help students transition from the highly regimented HS environment to the more self-directed So/Jr/Sr experience.* Freshmen who earn GPAs that are significantly below average worry us. In our experience, if a student cannot succeed in intro-level classes while having the benefit of our institutional support system for freshmen, it is highly unlikely that, absent serious changes that most students are not open to,** s/he will improve significantly during the So/Jr/Sr years.</p>
<p><em>There are plenty of ways for these students to get academic assistance and support, but they are asked to take more responsibility for getting that assistance.
*</em>This could mean anything from learning new time management skills to seeking counseling–it really varies.</p>
What if you have a 3.09 your freshman year? How high can you get it back up by getting 3.5 or higher the following years of school? Also does your GPA start fresh in college?
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
This thread is 3 years old. Don’t resurrect a 3 year old thread to ask a question. Don’t hijack a thread ever - it’s just rude. Start a new discussion with your question. Closing.
its possible</p>