<p>She's only a Soph in HS and I don't have any SAT scores yet for her. It seems like a lot of people that post on the board have much higher GPAs. When I went to school I thought 3.71 was a pretty good GPA but it doesn't seem like it now. If she is trying to get into say Penn State or UNC is her GPA already going to hurt her chances? Thanks for any help.</p>
<p>first of all, please bear in mind that CC is NOT representative of the applicant pool. alot of people here are amazing talented over-achieving people (not to say your D isn't, and I'm not one of them). I don't quite know what a 3.71 GPA is, but i think it's quite near to 4, it isn't so bad. someone else would have a better answer :)</p>
<p>Yeah Ive heard rumours that some people here post fake scores. :O</p>
<p>I probably messed up on the GPA. I just saw the report card last night and averaged her grades. She had mainly As and 2 B+ and 1 B-. Well, I'm trying to get her to look at this board to see the people she is competing against. She's interested in college but hasn't been pushing as hard as a lot of the people on here it seems. Her main EC is soccer. She also runs cross country. I told her next year maybe she should get involved with student body officer or something like that and she said she could probably easily get a position so I guess we will see. Are there things she should be doing right now for college? Thanks for the replies again!!</p>
<p>May I suggest you check out the Parents Forum on this board? Many of us, including me, started out like you as a parent of a sophomore trying to get a feel for what our children need to be doing. Your daughter's grades are good - is she taking a difficult course load (preAP, AP, or IB)? Any idea where she is rank-wise (although that can change drastically at this point - my daughter was 161/1227 after freshman year and is now 38/1225 after junior year)? Will she want to continue playing soccer in college? If so, you may want to check out the NCAA Clearinghouse for information on athletic recruitment - there are very specific requirements about contact you need to be familiar with. </p>
<p>When my daughter was a freshman, I left one of the college "big books" laying around. To my surprise, she actually looked at it and marked which colleges interested her. As a sophomore, we attended college night, went to the Colleges that Change Lives tour, etc. The next summer we toured many colleges. As a junior, she improved her grades, took tougher classes, accepted leadership positions, and took her SATs. Now she's a senior, has finalized her college list and is slowly making progress on her applications.</p>
<p>Good luck to you and your daughter!</p>
<p>I'm glad you're taking an interest in your daughter's education. I wish my parents did the same for me :(</p>
<p>Try to keep the B's to a minimum while taking fairly challenging courses Junior year.</p>
<p>A 3.7 is not a bad GPA. The applicants who post their statistics here are a self-selecting pool; those most focused on college admissions are most likely to both read college admissions material such as this site and most likely to push themselves for high grades. The actual pool of candidates applying to college includes a much broader range of students. For a better idea of what to expect, get one of those standard college statistics books (also online) so you can get a sense of the average scores of admitted students.</p>
<p>A 3.7 would be low for an application to Ivy League schools; for Penn State it seems quite reasonable.</p>
<p>GPA's are all over the place because of weighting. At many high schools, Honors are given extra weight, and APs even more. So it is is not uncommon to have GPAs of OVER 4.0. In fact, one scholarship my daughter's friend applied for said that over 90% of the kids who applied had GPAs over 4.0.</p>
<p>Colleges are different too. Sometimes they strip the GPA of any "weight" and weight it their own way.</p>
<p>Most colleges eliminate all but the five major academic areas, so that "A" in Phys. Ed usually doesn't help!</p>
<p>Some high schools are really weird - in my sister's town, nothing is weighted in 9th grade UNLESS it is not "beginning level" and then it IS weighted. So if you take Honors Spanish I you get no weight; Honors French II gets you an extra 40 points!</p>
<p>Our high school sends the colleges both the unweighted GPA and the weighted GPA, and lets them figure it out. Also, the school profile tells exactly how many people got each GPA range. If they see that 100 kids out of 125 got 3.0 or above, it tells you something about grade inflation at that school. And they ALSO do it for weighted grades, so the bell-shaped curve returns --- fewer kids get top grades when they are weighted; without weight, the "default grade" is a B+, which almost everyone gets.</p>
<p>it is hard to determine chances based on gpa so early...a lot of gpas drop junior year as a result of a much harder workload...i know this was the case for me...also every school gpa is different...my uncle is a dean for yale and says that rank now counts more even if a school does not rank a school can determine aranking system based on applicatants..there is such variance in schools for example most dont distinguish between a plus or a minus that could result in a lower gpa...colleges recacluate so worry more about rank or rough rank if school does not actually publish rankings such as mine</p>
<p>
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Are there things she should be doing right now for college?
[/quote]
The first thing is for you & her to be more informed about the college admission process. There are several excellent books about the process. I'd recommend "Looking Beyond the Ivy League" by Pope, admittedly biased towards small colleges but a good book. I also like "A is For Admission". An excerpt from a book about admissions is <a href="http://tinyurl.com/dg9nd%5B/url%5D">http://tinyurl.com/dg9nd</a> By learning now how colleges will be evaluating her app 2 years down the road you can be sure she's taking the appropriate classes, help guide her EC involvement, etc. This board is a good source of answers to specific questions but not so good at giving all the details from the ground up; it literally can fill books and thats way more than anyone's going to type here.</p>
<p>The second thing to do now, and this is a not something that needs to be rushed at this point, is to begin to explore what she's looking for in a college. Too many people are transfixed by names; they're asking "is Dartmouth or Harvard better for me?". Wrong!! The best approach is top-down and allows you to introduce the options to her as you decide what is right. In-state or farther away? A U, a LAC, or small-sized U? Urban, rural, suburban? Does she want to spend a semester abroad? Participate in sports in college (either intramural or on a school team)? Large lecture classes or smaller seminars/classes? A school where students live on campus or in the community? A big greek presence? As you can see there are lots of dimensions to colleges, and I've just touched on a few here. As a sophomore you have time to explain the options to her without having to rush to make any decisions; you have time to visit examples on casual trips, to talk to students at a variety of schools, etc. to explore the terrain.</p>
<p>Lastly you should run one of the the financial-aid calculators on the web. See what colleges are going to expect you to pay, and decide if you can afford it. There's no sense spending time exploring options that are going to be financially impossible.</p>