<p>During my junior year in high school I am going to take a Journalism class. I am taking the class because I love to write and the class is also linked to the School newspaper. However, all my other classes next year are either honors or AP classes and Journalism would be my only regular class. Obviously, I have nothing against regular ranked electives and I still want to take the course, but getting an A in the class would still lower my GPA. So, I was wondering whether I should take the class for Pass/Fail instead of getting a grade.
The info on the pass fail is this: If I get a grade (an A presumably) than I would get a 4.0 and my GPA would lower. If I take a pass fail, I would still get credit for the class but I just wouldn't get a letter grade and my GPA would be higher (2-3 points) and my class rank would be higher. Also, all of my letter grades would be coming from honors and AP classes.
I would also take Journalism my senior year for honors credit, so going into college I would have two Journalism years in high school with one of them being for an honors letter grade.
I really like the pass fail option here because Journalism is something I'm really excited about and it's not like I'm going to slack off or anything. However, it would take off a lot of pressure I might have from a test in the class or an assignment I have in the class that's assigned the same week as tests in all my AP classes. I would still get to write for the paper and have fun writing assignments to do, but I wouldn't lower my GPA and wouldn't feel pressure from the class.
(by the way, I'm looking at University of a California schools, University of Illinois, NYU, Wisc at Madison, and USC, and schools like Stanford)
Basically, here's my question: will the colleges I apply to really care, or do they have a preference or recommendation? Like, would they rather see me take the regular class and get an A, or would they not even notice and just see my Pass on the transcript, the high(er) GPA and class rank, and the honors level two Journalism on my senior year schedule and move on?</p>