I am in my final semester of community college and I have started applying to 4-year schools. I am already having a hard time because I just turned 24 which now makes me a “non-traditional student”. And now I have run into an issue that has me feeling like giving up. I started college back in 2009 and was in way over my head. I quit mid semester which resulted in several F’s. Then I tried to go back and had to move away near the end of the semester, once again received F’s. In total I have 27 credits of F’s. Now I picked myself up and went back to school and I’ve done very well. I have retaken every class I ever failed and replaced those F’s with A’s and B’s. I always thought that those grades “went away” because well they did at my community college, but now I am hearing conflicting stories that they don’t just “go away” and they will be included in the GPA that the admissions officers at the schools I am applying to look at. There is a HUGE difference between my GPA with only the replacment grades and the GPA that includes all the F’s. I have a 3.2(just new grades) and a 1.69(with old grade and new). If they are looking at the 1.69, I’m screwed. I won’t get in anywhere. I’m heartbroken and confused and feeling like I’ve wasted the last year and a half of my life. Most of the schools I was planning to apply to require at least a 3.0 for transfer students. Does anyone have any experience with this? Do I have a prayer? PLEASE HELP!! Thank you so much.
disclaimer: below are possibilities, you actually have to do the leg work to find out which one applies to each school you’re planning to apply to. Leg work = going in person to talk with admissions/deans. Set up appointments to meet in person via phone/email rather than try to explain everything in an email or over the phone. It’s much harder to dismiss someone standing in front of you than someone on a phone or their easily ignorable email.
The simplest scenario is that many large state schools admissions simply do it like HR departments for large companies, they average all college grades you’ve earned in your life and make a simple above cutoff/below cutoff admission decision.
If the director or associate director of admissions is not be available to you, you will get a peon adcom officer that will either not know how to handle your case and give you misinformation or worse, they’ll be very Draconian and tell you tough <strong><em>! In this scenario going directly to admissions will be a waste of time. Assuming you know what you’d like to major in, your potential destination school will have various deans associated with each academic college (i.e. dean of engineering school, dean of humanities and social science school, etc). One of these deans will be in charge of internal appeals for that program for students who are failing/suspended/appealing being kicked out/etc. They usually have a title like associate dean of undergraduate affairs or student affairs, you get the point. Even though you’re an external transfer, they’ll have either the authority to get you directly admitted to their program or can negotiate with admissions on your behalf. Obviously you want to make this person your champion/ally, so don’t try to </em></strong>** them or otherwise **** them off.
The next scenario is for admissions offices that follow the same formulaic approach to gpa calculation but are approachable or have a more amicable relationship between the colleges and admissions. In this scenario, the admissions director or associate director will be available to hear your case and you can appeal to them and/or they may also tell you to get in touch with a dean or department chair of whatever program you’re trying to get into to get their blessing.
Keep in mind that in both of the above cases admissions is still not guaranteed, and it may result in a semester of probation/conditional status if they do let you in.
More positive scenarios include the following:
-The admissions gpa calculation only takes the most recent xx number of credits completed (many grad schools do this) or only grades within the past xx number of years.
-The admissions gpa calculation takes only the highest grade for a course that was taken multiple times instead of the average.
-If you repeated the classes at the same school you originally took them at and they have a policy to
- literally replace the grade on your transcript so that it doesn’t show up visibly or in gpa calculation
- it shows up but isn’t used for calculation
- has a transfer agreement with destination school that whatever gpa they report is your official gpa regardless of how the destination school handles other schools’ transfer students. You mainly only see this with CC->State Schools
Of course you can always take more credits at 2 year schools ad infinitum until your overal gpa is over 3.0 D8