<p>...that Princeton doesn't look at your 9th Grade GPA. Is this true, or is someone blowing smoke? And if it's really true, then do they still see/use the cumulative GPA that includes freshman year, or do they completely recalculate based on your sophomore-senior GPA?</p>
<p>Gracias a Uds.</p>
<p>I have no definitive knowledge of this, first of all, but I really doubt that they take the time to recalculate your GPA to exclude freshman year. What I DO believe is that they do not put a whole lot of weight on your 9th grade grades when looking at your transcipt. I know that my freshman grades sucked, but I did very well 11th and 12th grade and got in. If you got a D freshman year in a class but then got straight-A’s the rest of highschool in AP classes the D won’t matter as much.</p>
<p>I didn’t have any drastically bad grades freshman year, it’s just that my GPA would be a 4.0 other than my three frosh B+'s. I was just curious, thanks!</p>
<p>They don’t look at freshman grades, but they do consider rank, which is affected by those grades.</p>
<p>So if you don’t have a perfect GPA overall but are a Salutatorian, then does that just make your school look worse, or does that make up for it at all?</p>
<p>Rank is king: It’s how colleges gauge the difficulty and competitiveness of your school. Being sal despite a lower GPA is a good thing–it means there’s less rampant grade inflation at your school than at most US high schools (and therefore that your grades are more meaningful).</p>
<p>i think they see your freshmen grades, but don’t take them into account (not sure how that works, but thats what ive heard). and rank is somewhat important, since a lot high schools don’t rank students, so admin officers have other ways of figuring out how applicants from different schools match up with each other.</p>
<p>I don’t think they recalculate your GPA, but they do not look at your freshman GPA.</p>
<p>I am pretty sure that Princeton said that they do not consider freshman year grades when looking at your application. With regards to recalculating your GPA; I’m sure they recalculate everyone’s GPA regardless. Every high school has a different way of calculating GPA, be it a 6pt, 5pt, 4pt scale, by letter grade or by individual point. (92 vs 93) My high school was even weirder in that the highest GPA you could get for a class(AP with a 99) was a 4.67. Top schools have their own way of interpretation of GPA’s, which really isn’t difficult for them to do now that everyone applies online, they would just have to put it through a computer program.</p>