My school requires you to take religious classes every year and this year they put me in a religious class that requires a lot of studying outside of school. I don’t want to take it and I don’t have the time but the school is forcing me. If I don’t study I can get a C+ in the class so I won’t fail it. If I do study I would get a B+ or maybe an A- but it would affect my other classes too so my GPA would end up being worse than If I just took the C. I can get this grade off of my GPA but it will remain on my transcript. The rest of my grades are A’s and my GPA is currently around a 96. I’m hoping to apply to selective schools next year (I’m currently a junior). Will colleges care if I have a C in a class if that class doesn’t matter or will the fact that I got a C be a huge turn off?
I think it will stick out on your transcript that you didn’t put in the effort.
Just do the work.
Selective colleges will care if you get C’s in religion classes.
Admissions folk may also look at it as a character issue. Most majors will have required courses that you may not like. Will you blow them off as well? It could well put you into the less desirable pile.
Any way you can ask them to make it pass/fail for you since it’s not counted as part of your GPA? If its not part of your GPA hopefully your transcript would make it clear that its not one of your “regular” classes. Why don’t you ask your high school registrar or high school counselor if there’s a way to get it off your transcript? Or maybe it can have a notation next to it that means not counted as part of GPA. Either way, is there a way to focus enough to get an acceptable grade, or is it too late being the end of a semester. I don’t think it will be the death knell of your college application process. If a college wouldn’t take you because of that they probably wouldn’t have taken you anyway, and maybe you don’t want to be at a place that hypercritical anyway.
@CorpusChristi
The way it works is that the school reports three GPA’s. One for secular classes, one for religious classes, and a combined one and the way its been explained to me is that colleges will typically disregard the last two. I was thinking about asking to take it a pass fail but that’s not a common thing in my school (although I had a friend who did it last year) but I’m worried that will look just as bad as a C because why else would I be taking a class pass fail unless I was to scared to report my actual grade
As long as you pass it doesn’t matter.
I also go to a school with religious classes and I have been told that colleges can’t use those classes’ grades to understand much because the classes do not have any official standards set for them (besides those set by the church). I don’t know if this is true or not.
The thing about religious schools that your parents pay for you to pay to attend, is that you get what they pay for, if that is 4 yrs of wasting an academic class on religious dogma, so be it. The gripe is with your parents, vs the school. In college, you will probably have to do some class you think is dumb and still work in it. If you listen to the usual trope about you being judged in the context of your high school, then you should reconsider your approach to throwing away an easy A.