The Letter B

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

<p>Throughout high school, i've taken challenging, and I mean the MOST CHALLENGING courses available to me. Like, most kids at my school take 2-4 AP's throughout high school, but I'm most likely going to be taking 10. But as we all know, with a hard course load inevitably comes a couple of B's. I would never go back and switch out harder courses for easy A's, because I really like taking classes that challenge me. However, I'm worried about my GPA being a bit lower than my classmates who have taken easy classes and gotten straight A's. </p>

<p>Do colleges like seeing a higher GPA with easier classes, or a slightly lower one with the toughest classes available? I'm looking into schools like Columbia and Stanford, and was simply wondering if this would really hurt my chances.</p>

2

<p>They prefer to see you taking the most rigorous course-load possible, even if it may damage your GPA. Too much grade inflation has been tarnishing the GPA’s reputation as a predictor for college success, so colleges are now resorting to admitting the kids take more and more advanced courses and do well in them.</p>

3

<p>Some of you people act like students who go to Ivies have never gotten a B, jeez…</p>

<p>Yes of COURSE they would prefer a B in an AP class than an A in a normal class.</p>

4

<p>That makes me feel a lot better, thanks :)</p>

5

<p>Depends what “slightly lower” means. Obviously they’d like to see you get mostly As in the advanced classes too.</p>

6

<p>My grades are mostly A/A- in my AP/Honors classes, I just have an occasional B here or there on my transcript.</p>

7

<p>What’s your class rank?</p>

8

<p>Your GPA will be higher either way, since there’s an extra weight added to honors/AP courses. At my school, the weight is 0.2/honors or AP course, but the most they’ll add is 0.8, so the highest GPA you can get every year with straight A’s is 4.8.</p>

9

<p>Colleges don’t care what your weighted GPA is because every school weights differently, if they weight at all. A lot of colleges will recalculate your GPA using their own scale.
Class rank matters a lot because it shows how challenging your school is. A 3.5 ranked 2nd would look a lot different than a 3.5 ranked 50th.</p>

10

<p>Not all schools weight honors or AP classes! My kids’ school does not. It was quite annoying to my older son. He finished #11 in his class, so he wasn’t listed in the top 10. Several of the kids in the top 10 had taken all CP classes. Didn’t seem fair.</p>

11

<p>My school doesn’t weight either, but someone who got mostly As in honors classes is still not going to be ranked all that low since most of the people who never take a single honors class aren’t the type to get mostly As.
A lot of ranking systems are screwed up, though. Some schools allow ties that make people’s rankings look better than they are, and some schools don’t rank at all. Which is a lot of the reason why standardized tests are considered important.
But a lower GPA can sort of be made up for with a high ranking.</p>

12

<p>colleges will be aware if a school doesn’t weight higher level classes, so that shouldn’t matter.</p>

<p>OP, have you taken any AP classes yet or are you saying that you plan to?</p>

13

<p>My school doesn’t rank students, but I’m pretty high up there.</p>

<p>stressedouttt, I’m taking four AP Classes this year as a junior (BC Calc, Chem, APUSH, and AP Lang) and taking 6 during senior year</p>