Hello, I am a high school sophomore, and as I am beginning to look at colleges I have a couple of questions about what they look for. I go to a specialized STEM program at a public high school, and at this school Honors classes are weighted how normal classes are in most schools, and AP classes are weighted a full grade above a normal class. Normal classes are actually weighted below what most schools do. I have heard rumors that colleges pay more attention to unweighted GPA and take into consideration what classes you’re taking, but I’m worried because some of the classes that are exclusive to my program are weighted as AP because they are as difficult as an AP class, without actually being called AP classes. I’m worried that colleges will look at my unweighted GPA and how many AP classes I am in, and wrongly judge my actual GPA, or that colleges would otherwise not think that my schedule is as rigorous as others because the classes do not have AP in the name.
My second question is about the actual grades that colleges look at. In my school, we take 8 classes per year and have 4 classes per day, and the year is divided into 4 quarter grades, a midterm, and a final for each class. Due to the relatively short length of each quarter, sometimes my individual quarter grades will not be as good as my final grades, because slipping up on a single test can often be crippling to a single quarter grade (for example, in the second quarter of this year I got a C in Spanish because of one test, and there was nothing I could do about it. As a normally very competitive student, this upset me). Would mishaps like this turn colleges away, or would they mostly pay attention to final grades?
Thank you, and any help is appreciated.