Regardless of the grades, I feel we should be able to choose whether we want college credit for these courses or not OR whether we want these grades calculated in LSAC/MCAS GPA. If we do not want college credit, we should be required to reimburse the school for the price of the course, and it should not reflect on our college transcript.If they insist on holding these grades against us indefinitely, then the same should go for AP students at the very least. Considering my school violated the articulation agreement with the school district, there should definitely be a way to remove these grades as I was not legally permitted to take these courses to begin with.
College courses are college courses. When applying to colleges even as an UG, those transcripts have to be sent. Poor DE performance can impact college admissions at 18, too.
Sounds unfortunate. Thanks for the heads up; I had not considered this in regards to dual enrollment.
Really? You can report AP grades on grad school applications?
**MODERATOR’S NOTE:
No, they can’t, even if they want. AP courses only go into the GPA calculation if the college assigns both a grade and credit. Most colleges which give credit do not assign a corresponding grade.
“Regardless of the grades, I feel we should be able to choose whether we want college credit for these courses or not…”
I don’t know if it varies from place to place, but my DD DID have the choice whether to get college credit for the class. The thing was, the kids had to fill out stuff online with the teacher’s help the first two or three days of class. They didn’t get to make the choice AFTER the final exam. Again, though, high school kids are optimists. Unless it is a class needed in order to fill a graduation requirement, none of them sign up and start a class expecting to do poorly (DEs are not required for HS graduation).
@skieurope That’s what I thought. I didn’t realize that any colleges assigned grades to AP courses. None of the schools DS looked at did so. They either gave you a few credit hours or were used for placement or were ignored entirely.
In the context of this thread, OP seems convinced that “AP students” have some massive advantage that just isn’t there. The heads-up about DE grades getting factored into your overall college GPA is a legitimate warning. I don’t think my son’s high school counselors ever pointed that out.
I don’t any that do, but I would not be surprised if there’s an outlier somewhere.
Let’s not conflate issues. To be clear, the college may (or may not) factor DE grades into its GPA. At my college, which is typical of selective colleges, college courses, whether DE or not, that are counted for HS graduation requirements are not given credit and are therefore not factored into GPA. However, if applying for med school or law school, all college courses are used for GPA calculation regardless of the policy of the undergraduate institution.
Presumably, you mean “overall college GPA for applying to medical or law school”, since most colleges do not include grades from transferred college course work in their own GPA calculations. (But if the student later matriculates to the same college, it is likely that the grades will count in GPA calculations.)
Another case where grades from college courses taken while in high school will count is if the student wants to transfer to a different college. In this case, the college being applied to will likely want to see all college academic records from all colleges.
Agree that many students, parents, and counselors are not well informed about this, which can lead to unpleasant surprises later if the grades earned are worse than desirable for whatever purpose they are used for later.
Whenever you transfer institutions, your GPA technically starts over. So if I didn’t do DE and went to FSU and received a 3.5 then transferred to UF, I would then have a UF GPA listed on my transcript and a FSU GPA listed on my transcript. These are called “in institution GPA’s”. I would also have a cumulative GPA which would be an overall GPA for all courses taken ever, regardless of where. Grad School’s, Med School’s, and Law School’s will receive and gauge admission decisions based on cumulative. While “skieurope” is technically correct, this does not mean DE grades will not hurt your chances of admittance to professional school, or that they are not part of the GPA on your transcript. This principal applies to everyone, DE or not. If professional schools didn’t look at cumulative and only in institution GPA’s, I could transfer to a different university, take one course before graduation, get an A, then apply to Professional school with a 4.0.
This is exactly why I started the thread. I saw a few forums where students were concerned that DE grades would be apart of their college GPA, and people would respond saying that the grades do not follow and are not factored into your college GPA. They ARE. It’s easy to confuse the language they use- technically they don’t, but in a much realer sense, and based on what these DE inquirers are probably asking and looking for, they do.
@ucbalumnus Some schools do incorporate transferred grades into the cumulative GPA as @mnsch1 stated in #29. The distinction is between institutional GPA and cumulative GPA. It is very much school specific.
For a non-serious example, Bama students who never make below a 4.0 GPA get to wear a red graduation cap instead of a black one. One of my ds’s close friends did not get to wear the red cap bc he had B’s from DE even though he maintained a 4.0 at Bama. The courses were factored into his cumulative GPA and it eliminated him.
This is a very important warning. My daughter attends an early college high school – the school offers an accelerated curriculum with no AP classes, instead the students go on to take classes at their state flagship. Some of the courses the students typically take are week out classes at that flagship meaning that the average grade is typically a C. Students having those grades on their transcript may be problematic if they decide to later on apply to med or law school. My daughter is interested in engineering so doesn’t seem as big of an issue, but I don’t think any of her classmates (or the parents for that matter) had been educated on this potential pitfall.
Even if, as of right now, the grades do not seem to affect her since she is planning on engineering I would recommend she discontinues unless she can achieve higher grades. The average student changes their major three times. What if she decided to pursue law several years down the road?
In additional, what if she wanted to get a Master’s in engineering or a PhD?
I feel it’s not worth the risk.
I’m a law school professor and regularly serve on our admissions committee. This is one of many problems with our admission process – it penalizes kids whose high schools didn’t have advanced offerings (or did, but the kid ran through them anyway). My school reviews applications much more individually than most law schools, so we can take it into account. But the fact is that the people who are really in charge of law school admissions criteria are the people who run the US News rankings and the university administrators who bow to them. The GPA that goes into our US News ranking has to include dual enrollment courses. I have to make a special case to admit someone whose dual enrollment grades would drag down our GPA profile.
As long as those who hire lawyers are highly law-school-rank conscious, law schools will have strong incentive to do what it takes for their rankings.
That’s too bad. My kid is having a great DE experience. Our state has free DE for qualified students but it is not allowed before junior year. I tell people, it’s better to start slow or late than be sorry. My son’s class quality has been really good. He’s learned a bunch. But yes those grades can follow you forever.
I was going to say, it is possible to get access to your records at a college. Most have a release available to do so. When my kid started DE, I had all his passwords and accounts too. It is possible to track your DE student as a parent. After his first semester success, I’ve been much more hands off.