How much of a bump is worth dropping middle school grades for?

[Anonymous]

Be glad you have this option OP. My child has taken 4 HS math classes and 2 English. The grades will appear on transcript and cannot be dropped off, even if they retake any of those in HS. Pretty crazy. But I’ve been told colleges will recalculate GPA for only grades 9-12, so it doesn’t matter. If anything, it shows rigor and accepting challenges

[Anonymous]

Donate the extra As to a needy student, and enroll at JMU.

[Anonymous]

I would leave them. The point difference is minimal, and the string of As adds to the story of a high achiever. As others said, colleges will calculate their own GPAs.

[Anonymous]

My kid was in essentially the same position as OP (all A's in MS, and all A's in HS with lots of AP's and IB classes in an APS HS (likely the same as OP's kid's HS). His overall GPA was a smidge higher than OP's, but would have gotten a similar boost by dropping the MS classes. He ultimately decided to leave them on the transcript, on the theory that seeing 5 more classes with an "A" was more beneficial than raising the wGPA by 0.05 or so (from 4.42 to 4.47).


For what its worth I assume that this was likely not an impactful decision overall, but he did not get any acceptances from his T20 college applications (in addition to his grades, he had a 35 ACT score and pretty good EC's/leadership). The "best" he did was Wake Forest and a **really** good merit offer from Northeastern. He picked NU and has done really well and is very happy.

[Anonymous]

drop em. you may apply to schools that only care about stats and it will help.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kid was in essentially the same position as OP (all A's in MS, and all A's in HS with lots of AP's and IB classes in an APS HS (likely the same as OP's kid's HS). His overall GPA was a smidge higher than OP's, but would have gotten a similar boost by dropping the MS classes. He ultimately decided to leave them on the transcript, on the theory that seeing 5 more classes with an "A" was more beneficial than raising the wGPA by 0.05 or so (from 4.42 to 4.47).


For what its worth I assume that this was likely not an impactful decision overall, but he did not get any acceptances from his T20 college applications (in addition to his grades, he had a 35 ACT score and pretty good EC's/leadership). The "best" he did was Wake Forest and a **really** good merit offer from Northeastern. He picked NU and has done really well and is very happy.

Interesting.

I would guess your kid is actually at a different school, because the OP’s timing suggest they are at a high school that does not offer any IB classes. That means they are not taking AP world as freshman, and the GPA would be lower.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid was in essentially the same position as OP (all A's in MS, and all A's in HS with lots of AP's and IB classes in an APS HS (likely the same as OP's kid's HS). His overall GPA was a smidge higher than OP's, but would have gotten a similar boost by dropping the MS classes. He ultimately decided to leave them on the transcript, on the theory that seeing 5 more classes with an "A" was more beneficial than raising the wGPA by 0.05 or so (from 4.42 to 4.47).


For what its worth I assume that this was likely not an impactful decision overall, but he did not get any acceptances from his T20 college applications (in addition to his grades, he had a 35 ACT score and pretty good EC's/leadership). The "best" he did was Wake Forest and a **really** good merit offer from Northeastern. He picked NU and has done really well and is very happy.

Interesting.

I would guess your kid is actually at a different school, because the OP’s timing suggest they are at a high school that does not offer any IB classes. That means they are not taking AP world as freshman, and the GPA would be lower.

You are right. I misread that part of the original post. My kid did take AP World as a freshman.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Weighted GPA is meaningless to colleges.

Do you think they are that stupid, and if you do, why would you want to send your kid to a place run by idiots?

Talk about a totally ill-informed, sweeping generalization. They mean a TON to many colleges you numbskull.

is there an efficient way to figure out which colleges care?