Serious question: Why are kids freaking out over grades?

My kid got Bs in AP Calculus and AO biology. I went to colleges and beyond for free because My parents were poor and I got grants. I am paying full pay for my kid’s college. My point is not that he got into Stanford doing everything he wanted but that he had a good back up at Honors College with merit scholarship. Believe it or not, many Honors Colleges give you big scholarships for making NMF even with far less than perfect GPA. So great GPA is not the only way to get into a good college situation. Stanford acceptance was totally unexpected, whereas frankly top UC acceptances were expected. You never apply to HYPSM and other top colleges thinking you have a good chance to get in. I have seen some kids with near perfect GPAs and test scores get denied by UCLA and Berkeley, while some kids with real low GPAs and test scores get accepted.

Not saying you shouldn’t try on classes you don’t like. But realize GPA is not the only thing they look at. And some smart, successful people are not motivated to get good grades.

@coolguy40 Yes, that’s what I meant and more. Few Bs not going to stop anyone from achieving their life goals. And there are other ways to get into top colleges with few Bs if that’s your goal. What I wanted to say was getting non A grades does not mean you are less bright, and you can still get into a good school with less than perfect grades. And trying different classes to find what area you like and want to pursue will take you further and bring you more success. But if you feel you are a very strong student academically, studying hard is also another avenue to academic success and self confidence but may not lead to as much success after that depending on your other qualities.

@toomanyteens To answer your questions, When I applied to college, I was considered a URM as an Asian applicant and my parents were recent immigrants and poor. I had 3.0 gpa, got 2nd highest SAT score in high school, played a lot of sports and I guess I wrote good enough essays and got into an Ivy. As you know Ivys are rich and cover your costs with grants, so I went to college for almost free. I got similar gpa in college but received some economic scholarship from a grad school, so being poor had this benefit. Now, my kid (Asian) is considered an ORM now and still got several merit scholarships from back up Honors Colleges, but we are considered too well off financially to receive any money from a private college. My point is getting few Bs is not going to stop you from getting into good colleges or achieving your life goals. They look at your ECs, talents, essays and test scores and LORs.

@websensation, You mean few B’s in 4 years don’t matter which is true. What about few B’s every semesters?

My kids’ high school does not weight. But if you get an A+ (98%-100%) in certain classes you get a 4.3 instead of a 4.0. Looking at Naviance (so last five years of outcomes), the lowest grade accepted at an Ivy or other “top tier” school was a 3,85(ish)…with most clumped around 3.95-4.1. There were a few outliers with lower GPAs; mostly athletes (the kids know). Talk to the kids and they will tell you: B+ in any course is the kiss of death. You can deal with a handful of A- at best…but most of those need to be offset by A+. The push now by the parents is that you have to have over a 4.0…the feeling from a certain subset of parents is that the less than 4.0 kids are the next to get excluded.

True story: a friend of a friend is an alum of a highly sought after school in the Boston…as is his wife, dad, grandfather. Private Equity guy. His son was a junior…3.75…lots of AP/Honors…1500+ SAT…three sport athlete…student leader…nice kid…one of those kids who just has it going on. Dad sets up a meeting with admissions director at his alma mater. He is told by the director that his son shouldn’t apply…a 3.75 is just too low coming from our high school. I don’t know the dad but I know of the kid and I was just floored.

So why do kids freak out? Because they are getting a very clear message from admissions.

Oh, c’mon. That kid’s problem is that his family expects him to get into Harvard. Not his GPA.

Being a straight A student except for 2 B’s spread across 4 years is a great GPA.

While GPA/transcript, is an important factor for admission at selective academic colleges, the specific details about how it is used can vary significantly. For example, Stanford was was mentioned above. They recalculate GPA without freshman year and without various non-core classes, sort of like the UCs. They also consider course rigor, how strong the grades are within your planned field(s) of study, and the context of the grades at the particular HS. The reported UW GPA’s of accepted students in the recent REA decision thread are 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.9x2, 3.93, 4.0x4 . The median GPA was a high 3.9+, but there were also some lower GPA admits, who all said they had no hooks. When I was admitted to Stanford several years ago, I fell into the relatively lower GPA group. However, my lower (nothing below B) grades were not in the STEM/objective fields that I planned to pursue in college.

Duke has been quite open about their admission process, which is described at http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2015/03/ferpa-request-gives-inside-look-duke-admissions-process . An observer to the decisions process wrote, "“If they had a lower grade, they asked, ‘Why did that lower grade occur? What was the story behind it?’” The article also mentions rating students on a scale of 1-5 in six categories, only one of which is GPA dependent. It’s great to get the max 5 rating in that category, but there are a lot of other important considerations in admissions decisions besides just that one category.

In the end, it doesn’t matter where you go to get your undergrad. What is more important is your grad studies.

That is sort of true. Debated endlessly out here. There are certainly colleges that do not provide a very high quality education that I wouldn’t want my kids to attend, though. And only a small percentage of students go to grad school, so if your undergrad education isn’t strong, it can hurt your career. And you do need to get a sufficiently high quality undergraduate education to score well on GRE/MCAT/etc. tests to get into grad school (and do well enough to stay in grad school once you get there). And sometimes the biggest name grad school is not the best choice for someone with very specific research interests. So… that is a broad statement with some nuanced exceptions.

Not necessarily true, if your career goal is not one that requires graduate or professional school. For example, if you want to work as a civil engineer, earning a bachelor’s degree in an ABET accredited civil engineering program makes more sense than earning a bachelor’s degree at a school that does not offer such a major.

Most college students going to work after their bachelor’s degrees need not freak out about grades as long as their GPAs start with a 3 (or 4) on a 4.0 scale (some “elite” employers may be exceptions). But those who want to go on to graduate or professional school may have to focus on their GPAs if such graduate or professional programs are highly selective.

Re. post #47. Many grad programs do consider the undergrad school as one component of the admissions process.

And as far as grades go – they’re a pretty major component for being admitted into grad school, so that’s another reason college students may freak out about them.

Of course, someone whose college GPA is floating between a 2.9 and 3.1 may be more likely to freak out about grades, since the difference in recruiting between a 2.999 GPA and a 3.000 GPA is considerable (the student with a 2.999 GPA gets auto-rejected by the approximately 42% (according to NACE) of employers using a 3.0 cut-off GPA as part of their resume review to select interview candidates).

Yes, that is mainly of importance for the first job. But it can be stressful if one has difficulty getting the first job when there are student loans to pay back, and if more limited offerings of first jobs limit the career development options one has.

Neither of my kids were interested in going to grad school at least not right away. So there undergrad institutions were important for their first jobs. I had an undergrad degree from Harvard and a grad degree from Columbia. When I was job-hunting in Munich, Germany guess which one they were impressed by? (They didn’t know there was no undergrad architecture school at Harvard.)

I think moderate freakouts about grades are understandable, but the truth is if the rest of the application is there, there are lots of schools that will over look some Bs - especially if they are in what they perceive as hard subjects. My younger son had straight B’s in Latin, a B in Honors Chem freshman year, a B+ in pre-calc and I’m pretty sure a bunch of English B+s and still got into top ranked in the top 30 of USNWR.

I’d expect the vast majority of students aren’t looking at the NACE report and instead the groups most likely freaked about about grades tend to be in different situations, such as students who have been especially focused on having a top GPA for a long time for various reasons that have been discussed in this thread (this group tends to have a GPA well above 3.0), students who have not been especially focused on having a top GPA in the past and need to change due to recent GPA-related academic issues (academic probation, may lose scholarship, may not meet major requirements, in danger of failing a class, etc), and students who are more prone to anxiety or related mental health issues.

Sadly admission and scholarships are more competitive now for my younger son that it was for his older brother 10 years ago. With a 35 ACT 4.0 GPA in all AP classss just starting to get the deferral and rejection decisions for EA at more selective schools. Safe schools are offering much lower scholarships than my older son was offered with a 28 ACT. Now waiting for regular decisions

The opacity of the application/acceptance process is largely to blame, imho, for some of the freakout over grades. Note that this is mainly limited to the higher end kids because they’re trying to get into ultra-selective schools. Kids read hard statistics on the admitted/enrolled students at those schools and see things like, “Over 95% of our students are in the top 10% of their HS class”. Boom! The grade freakouts and HS AP arms race are a natural result. Same goes for the SAT & ACT arms race. Those are the only facts that are visible in the selection results and, importantly, the only real things the kids can control.

It doesn’t help that kids don’t get any feedback on their application other than a yes, no, or wait (deferred). Why did my D18 and all her friends (and everyone they know) get flat out rejected by Stanford REA? No one knows! What are the juniors at her HS supposed to do in response to those results? An obvious one would be, “I need to take more AP classes to stand out to the AOs”.

@SculptorDad You just have to get good test scores and apply to Honors Colleges in state schools with scholarships. You cannot think you will get into top schools just with perfect GPA. My feeling is you should not (you can if you want) have it as your high school goal to get into HYPSM and should have good safety schools. For our kid, UCLA and Berkeley were his match schools and two Honors Colleges were his safeties, and Stanford was a Hail Mary attempt. There are different ways to end up where you want to go.

My kid had 3.9 gpa with tough courses and took certain courses he didn’t think he would like just to find out if he liked the area, not with a goal of getting perfect gpa. I am saying don’t get into a mental frame of thinking you need perfect grades. I thought 3.9 gpa was perfectly fine to apply to the very top schools. It wasn’t going to be his gpa that was going to determine his rejection or denial.

Without top grades, you will not get into our state flagship university.