Throughout high school my grades have been solid, with mostly As and a couple of Bs, but I am very sure that I am going to get a C+ in AP Stat first semester senior year. I have always taken the hardest courses offered at my school, with 4 APs junior year (AP Bio, APUSH, AP Calc AB, and AP English Language) and 4 APs senior year (AP Statistics, AP Macroeconomics, AP English Literature, and AP Spanish), and have several leadership positions and pretty good extracurricular activities. I know that senior year grades matter, but I was just wondering if there were people who got a C senior year and were still admitted into selective colleges. For me personally, there really isn’t much of an explanation for the lower grade, just the fact that I’m not very good at it, and my teacher isn’t great either.
Do I have any hope for college admissions (at competitive schools ie Tufts, Emory) or am I probably only getting into my safety schools?
You have several posts in the past year or so and the theme of just about all of them is “school is hard for me, I’m not doing as well as I’d like.” Yet you persist in asking about the effect it will have on selective college admisisons and ignoring the lesson the world has been trying to get across the past few years.
So here it is in explicit can’t-miss format: your study skills & habits are putting you behind your better peers in HS, and will really hurt you in college
Many students, often in fact the better students, have never learned to study effectively and just get by on native smarts. After they go over the material a few times it seems familiar and they think they “know” it, confusing recognition with recall. In most classes they remember enough for the test and their verbal skills let them pad out essays, but on math tests they find out they can’t recall enough to solve many problems. Unfortunately once they get to college this cursory study approach won’t work even in subjects where it was enough back in HS, since the expectations will be higher and the questions on tests more challenging.
Add in not prioritizing learning and choosing to spend time on ECs or with friends when there is studying to be done, sprinkle in blame on “bad teachers”, and you’ve got a recipe for under-performance. No matter where you end up going. You can spend the remaining time in HS worrying about college admission, or you can decide to try to become a better student. Up to you.
For allocating time, its up to you to decide how important learning really is. For study skills there is a recent book that you ought to read to understand how to learn effectively, titled “Make it Stick”. Written by 2 of the leading researchers, it covers not just the theory but practical applications for HS and college students
I did notice that right before writing this, but honestly its because this year is especially stressful because of the fact that I don’t have four quarters to get my grades to where I want them to be. At this point I am trying my hardest to make sure my midterms are fine, but this question was just basically to ask what the impact would be if my grade doesn’t go up and I am stuck with a C on my transcript. I just like to prepare for the worst lol.
College admissions is not predictable, I think that is what people are trying to tell you. There are plenty of people that will be applying to qualified spots, and your best chance is to raise your grade your third quarter and send them a update on your progress, showing that you have been making active efforts to improve. No one can tell you whether this will or will not affect your chances without having exactly what the admissions officers have in front of them when they view your profile. That said I did get into a college with a couple of C’s, so it is not the end of the world, but you do have to make sure everything else is pretty much outstanding and that you wow them with things like your essays or your other accomplishments.