<p>here is the deal: I got a C+ in AP Chem in the fall term of my senior year,and I am very, very worried. I have posted this before, but i just started getting stressed over this again after the New Year. How much have I ruined my chances of getting in very competitive schools. I mean REAL competitive, schools like Yale, Princeton, Penn, MIT…I have been a straight A student through out my high school career, this is the first time that I got a grade below an A. And if I can improve my chem grade in winter mid-term signficantly, how much will it help? thanks for your help!</p>
<p>It does make them go “hmmm…” but you still have a shot if your other grades are good. Don’t stress too much… they’ve accepted people with C’s before. Just make sure you pull your grade up in there.</p>
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<p>more thought?</p>
<p>yeah. don’t worry 'bout it. You don’t need to ‘explain’ it or anything, but they’ll take a second look. If all your other grades are high, they won’t assume you’re slacking.</p>
<p>Did your parents freak you out by saying that if you slip and don’t get all A’s you’ll get rejected by all the top schools? Because if so, they’re entirely wrong. In two and a quarter years of one course, I never got anything higher than a B+ (including a solid C) and Harvard still accepted me.</p>
<p>Not that I recommend slacking off or anything; I had specific reasons for not doing well in the class and I tried my hardest to get good grades all the way through. But don’t get too worked up over one bad grade. It sounds like you’ve done an exceptional job throughout high school.</p>
<p>My advice: take all this energy spent worrying about Yale and divert it to Chemistry. Do it for your sake, not Yale/Princeton/UPenn/MIT. It might benefit your application later, it might not, we have no idea whether they’ll care at all. Unless you plan on being a science major, it shouldn’t create the huge waves we have nightmares about.</p>
<p>It’s taken me several months to figure out that getting into college is only a liiiiiiiitle part of life. There’s no point in wasting that life on this sort of thing.</p>
<p>You struggled in a subject, that does not destroy your chances of getting in. It only paints you as a person with struggles, however, I would have recommended getting that teacher to write you a recommendation. Unless you did horrible because yo uwere working hard, that teacher would be able to highlight what you learned, why you struggled, and if it was because utter incompetence, or simply the mechanics of a student trying very hard no matter what grade he or she received.</p>