<p>My daughter is a junior at a very competitive public hs. She's taken all honors classes (when offered) since Freshman year. She's planning to take 4 AP courses next year when she's a senior. </p>
<p>Her courses this year and grades through mid-term are as follows:</p>
<p>AP CalcAB (A)
Physics H (A+)
Spanish 4H (A+)
Latin 1 (A+)
American History H (A)
English H (B+)</p>
<p>Obviously she's doing well this year. Last year her unweighted GPA was 3.97.</p>
<p>Freshman year was in her words, "a disaster." Final unweighted GPA was 3.54.</p>
<p>Question is: How do the good colleges (not ivies) deal with a kid who didn't do well freshman year but consistenly brought her grades up?</p>
<p>Also, admissions officers are always saying the kids should take as rigorous a program as possible. Will it be a problem that she's waiting till senior year to take most of her APs?</p>
<p>My Ds school only allows Jrs to take maybe one at most two APs....language, math....or maybe a science...as a Senior my D is taking 4 APs..</p>
<p>Your Dis taking honors classes, and doing wll, just keep plugging away</p>
<p>When she applies and they see the upward trend the classes she IS taking as a senior, that she has stretche herself, it will be a good thing (to quote Ms. Martha)</p>
<p>Many schools don't offer APs to underclassmen, and just a few to Jrs., so your D is not alone</p>
<p>As I said my Ds school doesn't have a huge amount of AP classes, but the ones they have are strong.</p>
<p>As well, colleges can tell if a curriculam is filled with Fluff APs....
Some schools don't require the kids to even take the AP test...</p>
<p>So tell your D she is doing fine, and to eat a cookie</p>
<p>Having a bad freshman year and then improving later is common. Admissions officers understand that kids grow up over time. I wouldn't worry about it.</p>
<p>Your daughter is taking six academic courses, including an AP course and four honors courses, and she has earned 5 A's and 1 B. That's a tough courseload, with good results. She also has an impressive interest in languages. Many kids never make it to level 4, and very few ever try a second foreign language, as your daughter has done. Just on the basis of what you've shown us, I think her record looks very good.</p>
<p>Everything is relative. For some kids, an unweighted 3.54 would be a good GPA. But for those who know that they are capable of a 3.8 or 3.9, it's a big disappointment.</p>
<p>I have one kid who graduated from high school with an unweighted 3.5 and considered it plenty good enough. My other kid never got below an unweighted 3.8 in any semester and would have been horrified if she did. Different strokes for different folks.</p>
<p>Really. Things are going great. Some colleges don't even take 9th grade into account when they recalculate GPAs. And even if they do, they discount it. And even if they lump everything together, your daughter's overload should dilute those few pesky Bs further. And even if that doesn't happen, assuming she continues to do well her GPA will not keep her out of any school in the country.</p>
<p>tsdad: There's NOTHING wrong with a 3.54 unweighted gpa. Like Marian, I have one kid who would be thrilled with anything over a 3.0. My daughter is very motivated and is just figuring out now that this stuff may affect her future. We never really pushed our kids grade-wise.</p>
<p>Add to that that she's very competitive and we live in a community which is filled with type A kids and type triple A parents. I think she's feeling alot of that.</p>
<p>My husband and I made it very clear that she is doing very well and that she'll get into a good school, but she seems to be making herself nuts no matter what we say.</p>
<p>you as a the parent need to give her a reality check...don't compare yourself to others sooooo much, which sounds like what she is doing</p>
<p>she needs to focus on how she is doing, if she is having some fun, if she likes her ecs, if she has some good friends and to enjoy herself a little</p>
<p>one thing to do, is to have a day, say saturday, where you don't ask or talk about anything grade or school related....we as parents sometimes don't see how we can feed into the weirdness while asking seemingly innocent questions</p>
<p>What school is she aiming for? What are her SAT scores? What is her lopsided passion? How is her writing? </p>
<p>The trick in applications is to distinguish an application from all the other 3.9 GPA apps. Especially among girls, a 3.9 GPA is quite common. Who is she? Why would colleges want her--especially--on their campus?</p>
<p>thanks for the advice. she actually has a very full life. she has nice friends. a job that she loves, plays a sport, goes out on the weekends, etc. </p>
<p>last night I was teasing her and told her to stop studying and watch Grey's Anatomy with me (it's mid-terms right now.) she laughed and told me that it's against the law to watch tv during mid-terms (but told me to tiVo it).</p>
<p>She's a very well-adjusted girl. she just wanted to know how admissions officers would feel about her freshman year grades.</p>
<p>As others have mentioned above, some schools don't even look at freshman grades, such as Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. She's fine, not to worry.</p>
<p>"The trick in applications is to distinguish an application from all the other 3.9 GPA apps. Especially among girls, a 3.9 GPA is quite common. Who is she? Why would colleges want her--especially--on their campus"</p>
<p>Thanks for mentioning this. She hasn't taken SATs yet. She knows she has to distinguish herself from the pack. She's thinking about it. She's not looking at ivies. So far she's thinking about U of Maryland, BU, Tufts (a reach) and a couple of others. We looked at Cornell but she was fairly intimidated.</p>
<p>Wow...may I ask where you live? I want to avoid that kind of competition at all costs!</p>
<p>(Not being facetious...I really don't want to live anywhere near type "Triple A" parents, or have my kids be in a school system where a 3.5 might be considered "a disaster" by any student, even if it's not as strong as they would like. We relocate a lot and it's very very important to me that we not be in a town like that.)</p>
<p>You won't know whether Tufts is a reach until your daughter takes the SAT. Certainly, her GPA won't keep her out. They might appreciate her interest in foreign languages, too; they're so into international stuff there.</p>
<p>I have a son at Maryland. Most of the out-of-staters are from your area, so your daughter would probably feel quite comfortable there. If she decides to apply to Maryland, make sure that she does it EARLY (before November 1). There are a lot of interesting special programs for entering students (Gemstone, Honors, College Park Scholars, other stuff), but those who apply after November 1 may be excluded from consideration for these things. It's a good idea to be in one of the special programs, at least at first, because the people in each program live together in the dorms, and that makes the huge campus seem smaller. If the program turns out to be more trouble than it's worth, a student can always drop out later. Maryland is great for people who like Washington, DC; students can get there easily using a campus shuttle bus and the Metro. However, the community around the campus isn't the nicest; this is Maryland's biggest drawback. If your daughter hasn't visited Maryland yet, she probably should, so that she will understand that College Park is nowhere near as nice as its name suggests.</p>
<p>Thanks Marian. We did visit U of Maryland. We all loved it. We didn't see much of the town, but what we did see didn't look bad. I think it's probably her first choice. She liked Tufts as well but as a rule, she's not a great test taker. We'll see. I'm enjoying the process. Hope she can relax a bit.</p>
<p>Another nice thing about Maryland is that if you get good scores on many of the AP tests, you can place out of various CORE (general education) requirements, thereby providing yourself with additional electives. Many other colleges do not let you use APs to satisfy distribution/general education requirements.</p>
<p>This could be a nice motivator for your daughter to work hard in her AP courses next year.</p>
<p>Momnewtothis, you should talk to the school guidance counselor and get a copy of the school profile. It should show you where your daughter is in comparison to others at her school. In the world of the blind, a one eyed man would be king, they say, and so it goes with AP or advanced courses. If everyone iis taking much more than she is, their grades and schedules will be evaluated in light of this and so would hers. Also find out what schools kids with her stats tend to get in. If noone with stats at her level has ever gotten into Cornell, for instance, unless she has something that the college really wants, her chances of getting in there are poor. On the other hand, if the GC feels that plenty of kids like her have been accepted there, it would be a better bet.</p>