<p>Will PhD admissions people notice and care that I have an strong and clear upward trend in my GPA ( my first two years were horrible). My major GPA is also about .25 higher than my cumulative GPA. </p>
<p>Also, how accurate is the US News Ranking listed GPAs? They only list the average GPA of all grad entrants. I'm assuming they are listing it by the school that i selected (engineering) and that MS GPA is slightly lower than average and PhD GPA is slightly higher than average.</p>