<p>I have had a B/B+ heavy transcript throughout high school with a slight upward trend. Grades had never been important to me or my parents and I figured as long as I learned the material by the end of the year I had succeeded in the class. Unfortunately this doesn't help me now as my GPA is the only truly weak part of my application and I was thinking of emailing the adcoms at my top schools with a message of a similar vein. It won't be excusatory as much as a statement of facts on my grade trend. I was wondering if this would end up helping or if it could end up hurting my chances.</p>
<p>Why don’t you just write your essay about it?</p>
<p>No, I wouldn’t say so. It is a chance to explain what really happened so they’d get the bigger picture of who you are.</p>
<p>They usually have a place for that in essays or additional letters/documents or something. I don’t think it could hurt you, but I don’t feel like admissions don’t have enough time/wouldn’t care enough to swift through a boatload of apps plus emails from students explaining their bad grades.</p>
<p>I think if you feel you need to explain your school performance, and it had to do with a philosophy of how to live life, that should have been included somewhere in the application itself. You will look like you are a day late and a dollar short.</p>
<p>No. Your application should clearly show where your interests were, and what you put your energies into during high school. Not everyone is an academic, that doesn’t mean they aren’t smart. It means they had other interests. You need to show what those were and why there were important. </p>
<p>What you do not get to do is have it both ways. You don’t get to enjoy the academic learning style you chose, but then you want to be evaluated on the same level with those that placed a high value on academic achievements. </p>
<p>People are different. Admissions officers look for people who will add interesting value to the university community. That’s not 100% cookie cutter students. What did you do differently? Where do you fit in? Do not make excuses for what you didn’t choose, celebrate what you did. </p>
<p>The move you suggest will only come across as a weak attempt to excuse an academic record you are now unhappy with. That’s not a strong hand to play. Always, always play to your strengths.</p>
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Exactly. That’s why the only place I would put this is in one of my primary essays, and the grades wouldn’t be the focus as much as life philosophy. I would not put it in the open space asking for additional information, and definitely don’t email the admissions officers.</p>
<p>Don’t write an email, don’t put it in Additional Info, and definitely don’t waste your essays writing about it. Your essays are your opportunity to show adcoms positive things that are uniquely you. Don’t squander your essays to make excuses for your grades.</p>
<p>Your academic record is what it is, there’s nothing to elaborate on.</p>
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If you don’t mean for it to excuse your grades, then you expect them to make the same decision after reading it as they did before. After all, its not excusing anything, right? And you can get that result by not sending the email.</p>
<p>Wait, you say, not going there, that’s not what you have in mind.</p>
<p>Which of course shows the circularity of what you say. You indeed WANT it to be excusatory, you want them to disregard your past grades and look at the “new you”. I mean, you can quibble by adopting a narrow definition of “excuse”. But when you really get down to it, you want them to ignore your past record for the reasons you’re going to write in the email. That’s an excuse.</p>
<p>And BTW excuses don’t go over well with adcoms. I can already see the slant you are taking.
Yep, your parents didn’t hold you to appropriate standards and you paid the price. Once you expand this out to a letter-length explanation its going to sound even worse. You’d be hurting your chances, not helping, by blaming others (your parents, that lousy school that didn’t guide you correctly, we can go on and on).</p>
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If taken at face value, I would say the OP’s approach to learning (quoted below) is praiseworthy and moderately unique among applicants to selective schools. Granted no one wants to read an essay about grades, but an essay about “learning”/educational philosophy could be appropriate. After all, these are institutions of higher education first and foremost. Maybe OP could even spend a paragraph sharing his thoughts on our nation’s preferred educational model if he cares about that stuff. If essays questioning the logic of grades are worthy for the NYT, surely they can work for an admissions essay, provided the focus remains on the applicant and not abstract educational theory.</p>
<p>Will it be the best essay? Probably not. Could it be a good enough essay that shows the admissions officer about his character and priorities? Definitely. Might the OP have better ideas to write about? Only he knows. If he doesn’t have any ideas, I think this one has some potential. </p>
<p>I wrote my common app essay about how artificial high school had become (my friends just joining clubs to pad their resumes) and how that wasn’t me and wasn’t the way I was raised. Did it help excuse the fact that I didn’t have a laundry list of extracurriculars? Maybe, but that wasn’t something I felt needed to be excused- if anything, I was proud of the fact that I was committed wholeheartedly to the few things I did do. Was this essay great? Probably not, but it was good enough to get me, my 3.7 GPA, and 2.5 ECs into a handful of top 20 schools. </p>
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<p>OP, this is a terrible idea. First of all, your “facts” won’t help your application because there’s no reason for a college to believe that you actually did “learn the material by the end of the year” and no reason for a college to accept you instead of someone who managed to both learn the material and get excellent grades. Second, your “facts” will hurt your application, because explaining that you could have done better but chose not to will suggest that you will continue to underperform in college.</p>
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I think its actually worse than that. Rereading what the OP wrote
At first I thought the same as you seem to be thinking, that the OP didn’t worry about learning the material in time for tests, just by the end of the year.</p>
<p>But that seemed a bit funny thing to say. Then it occured to me what the OP probably means. It wasn’t enough to “explain” his grades by saying his parents had low expectations and didn’t particularly care. He wants to add a bit more spin regarding comparisons to kids that got better grades.</p>
<p>Imagine an academic world where things are black-or-white. If you take Civics at the end of the year you understand the gov’t or you don’t. If you take algebra at the end of the year you can do algebra or you can’t. In such a world grades don’t measure any real differences in learning, just some trivial quality we might call “gradeiness”. So when the OP says “learned the material by the end of the year” he’s trying to say that there is no real difference between him and the kids with better grades, just that gradeiness thing. </p>
<p>Of course now that he’s discovered colleges care about gradeiness he’s all on board and will do what it takes to get good marks, but in the meantime nobody should think for a moment he got any less out of his earlier classes than the kids with better grades.</p>
<p>You can imagine how well this is going to go over with adcoms, once they understand what he’s saying.</p>
<p>And this is one of the reasons I oppose kids writing letters of “explanation”. They typically don’t have the skills to do it properly, and end up hurting themselves more than helping.</p>
<p>Do not e-mail admissions about B grades.</p>
<p>DO NOT email admissions about your grades. If you feel you must provide an explanation, have an adult at your school, preferably your guidance counselor, or one of your teachers who is writing your recommendation, be your advocate and write a letter explanation on your behalf. Otherwise, no matter how well written an explanation you write, it will come across as whiney and excuse laden. Look at MIT’s website and see what a great letter from an adult can do: [Writing</a> Recommendations | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/apply/prepare/writingrecs]Writing”>How to write good letters of recommendation | MIT Admissions)</p>
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