Hello! I moved to the United States about one-half years ago from my home country of Colombia due to my father’s job. This was in March of 2016 where I was almost finishing the end of my sophomore year. Before I moved to America, my school (private) gave me a special transcript which thoroughly explained their grading methods and how grades in this school would “compare” to their American counterparts. The difficulty of the courses I was taking that year could’ve been compared to that of taking an AP course (barring the exam of course). To my surprise, when my grades were “transferred” many of the grades I saw did not match what they would look like in the transcript I was talking about. In addition to heavily lowering my GPA, the credits I had taken in Colombia were recognized as basic regular classes (the topics did not match at all the curriculum of these supposed classes I had taken) making my course history look very different from what is supposed to look like. I have talked to the administrators and they have told me that their reasoning was because they could not recognize my school’s system. Instead, they went with the national standard of my country (this would not be a problem if everyone had the same system, which unfortunately for me is not the case). I would not complain so much if college admissions were not so competitive, but as most of you know that is far from the truth. I also feel that I have been treated unfairly by the county and they have ignored my concerns and haven’t given me any guidance on how I could solve this problem. I figured that my only shot at going to a good University is getting an absurdly high SAT score, yet I feel this might not be enough to make the cut. I’m hoping that somebody out there has dealt with a problem similar to mine, and hopefully he/she ended up just fine. Anyways, if you read until here thank you and hopefully, the next time I write here I might be a freshman at one my dream schools. I guess, to summarize, my question would be: “How should you approach college applications knowing this circumstance?”