Currently, I am a high school freshman in my second semester of the school year. Transitioning into high school wasn’t easy, especially considering the fact that this year, due to COVID, was all online. I tried my best even with the circumstances and I did fairly well considering the fact that I got all A’s in every class… except for one. This subject happens to be art. Art was a mandatory subject we had to take in our school so it wasn’t an elective of mine. Our teacher is extremely harsh when it comes to grading artwork and gave vague instructions on how to make artwork. Art is supposed to be one of those subjects where you let your creativity run around and make artwork from them but instead, our teacher always had high set standards on how the artwork was supposed to look like. I struggled a lot trying to figure out how to crack the subject of art which was the reason why I got a 78 for my semester grade in art. Currently, I am excelling in the subject of art and have an A grade as well but I’m really scared of the effect that one C will have on my high school transcript. I want to be able to go to T20 colleges but I feel as if this one C will ruin all of my chances of getting into renowned universities such as Stanford or brown or Colombia and etc. I also have considered looking into retaking the course over the summer to bring up my GPA into hopefully a 4.0 (unweighted) again but I’m not sure just yet. What should I do? even if I didn’t retake the class, would it affect the college’s decision to if they should admit me or not? Is there any way I can replace that bad grade for a better one so it doesn’t show up in my transcript?
Hello.
First, I would like to congratulate you on finishing your first semester of high school during the most stressful year ever. I’m a HS senior currently waiting on my college decisions, so we’re kinda in the same boat. This has been a crazy year, and it’s nice to see that you got good grades despite the challenges of remote learning.
Second, there are two points I would like to make. The short answer: NO. You are perfectly fine. The first point being is that colleges know that for many, if not all, applicants, freshman year probably isn’t the best reflection of their academic potential by the time they apply to schools. Luckily for us, T20 schools practice hollistic admissions. So, your grades, essays, activities, letters of recommendation, course load, and other factors are taken into consideration when reviewing applications. So, I think it is safe to say that one C isn’t going to make your dream schools say “oh no, we gotta reject them”.
Additional point is that colleges also like to see an upward grade trend. For example, if you got this 1 C in your freshman year and have close to straight A’s by your senior year, this shows colleges that you’re academically driven in a better context. This shouldn’t be an issue for you, as you have shown in your grades this year, that you work hard and are capable of getting high grades. Again, grades are not everything. but this upward trend of high grades is definitely what you aim for.
I hope this gives you some insight and can help you be a little more calm. Overall, the important takeaway is that this one C in a freshman art class is not going to be the deciding factor of your app. You are going to be perfectly fine 
Also, thousands of students with over 4.0 GPAs get declined from T20s. Even if you didn’t get a C in art, it would still be competitive to get in. This grade alone would not be the deciding factor to whether or not you get into a T20.
Get another year in and see where your interests lie. You should be choosing a school because its the right fit for you, not trying to fit yourself into a T20 school box just because of the school name.
First of all you are a high school freshman. Your grades in freshman year will be less important than for the rest of high school. Schools know that some students start a bit slow.
Secondly, we are in the middle of a pandemic. This has been a very tough year for nearly everyone. Quite a few students have gotten grades that were not normal for them, usually in the downward direction.
Thirdly, this was art. This was not your math or science or English class. If you apply to universities to study mathematics or biology, how good you are as an artist is not going to be their #1 concern.
I think that you should continue to do as well as you can and just do not worry about it. When it comes time to apply to universities make sure that you you apply to at least two safeties and keep your budget in mind. As another comment has said, “top 20” universities in the US routinely reject students who had straight A’s for the full four years of high school. However, they will also sometimes accept a student who had a C somewhere along the line. Admissions at the top schools is hard to predict.
won’t hurt.
Even at the most elite schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.,) a C in a non-academic course (gym and art are the classic examples) will be completely ignored.
This definitely made me feel calmer I really hope that you can get into the colleges you applied for!
Even with these components, do you think it would be necessary to retake the class for hopefully a better grade? i want to do everything i can to bring up my grade. my second semester GPA is currently a 4.0 but my first semester GPA was a 3.81 due to that one c.
For an art class, no. If this was algebra or precalculus I would be far more concerned. However, assuming that you are not planning on being an art major, I would not worry about it. Even if you were going to be an art major, different art teachers are going to have very different styles and a “style clash” can and does happen.
I happen to have gotten a couple of very bad grades in art classes in university (a C and a D), and this did not seem to have any impact at all on my graduate school admissions (as a math major). It did have a big impact on my overall undergraduate GPA, but this did not seem to matter. I did not retake either. I still got into a top university for my master’s. Since you got the C as a freshman in high school, I think that it is even less important.
I would not retake it. I would not worry about it.