[LUX.]

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[Kikyo]

I've heard that colleges take into consideration improvement over the years.. so from what you've said, your gpa has improved over time. So I'm sure it's not a bad thing.

[josebiwasabi]

they look at the courses you're taking.

and also, i don't really know of any schools that allow freshmen to take AP courses. furthermore, many schools don't even weight GPAs (each college has their own weighting system), so it actually doesn't matter what your exact GPA is according to your high school, although generally it's a fairly good method of figuring out whether or not you have a good chance.

[chinese tears <3]

Umm, 3.95 is already pretty good. Plus it doesn't even matter because practically none of the private schools do weighted GPA. Many private schools don't only want to look at your GPA now, they want people who are all-arounders.

[Odyism]

Also admission officers mainly look at your grades from jr. year (and the 1st semester grades from sr. year).

[AZNbOYreACTI]

colleges also do not really look at freshman year, don't sweat it.

[TheFrontline]

Every school looks at GPA differently. Do research on the school's admission site...it's not that hard.
When I talked with admission officers from Claremont McKenna, Stanford and UPenn, they said they look for upward trends in GPA. However, most super-selective colleges take a holistic perspective of you, so you never know (i.e. Many kids from my school with 2300 SAT scores, ~4.0 GPA get rejected from Harvard, Stanford, Pomona, etc. and I go to one of the top private schools in northern California)

[sukadaichi]

I think GPA is not the most important factor in your application.
If a school that loves looking at one's GPA, I think it should also look at one's ranking^^

And it also depends on the difficulty of the courses you take. I can give you an example, that's my country, Vietnam. Here we use the 10.0 scale, and it's impossible for a student to get 10.0 GPA. The best student in the best high school here only gets 9.5 (and if convert directly he has 3.8 GPA, lolz). And that boy was accepted to Dartmouth though Dart's average GPA is 4.0. To many other students in my school who only got 8.5 (means 3.4 haha) but were accepted to Stanford and Harvard. The only thing we did was giving the admission office a report of our study program's difficulty and our rankings, so everything would be ok then^^.

And it must be stupid of a school to reject a student who gets 3.5 GPA but achieves National or International/Olimpic Honors =))

So Goodluck!

[LUX.]

wahh! thank you all so much for your help and words of reassurance!

you've definitely calmed my nerves!

THANKS AGAIN!!<33