<p>I’m nearing the end of my freshman year of high school (Don’t jump all over me yet, I’m not one of these pretentious ass***** who tries to guess his GPA for the rest of his career and asks you to chance him for Med School), and I had a pretty bad start. I hope to get into some pretty good-Great colleges in a couple of years, but I totally screwed up the majority of the year. Although I was able to make up for a lot of it in the second semester, I’m still looking at around a 3.33-3.4. One of the largest reasons for this was my decisions (one I hope to be able to explain away on college applications) to take Chinese. I HATE the language, and am going to just barely scrape away with a B at the end of the year. Therefore, I’ve decided to drop the language in my sophomore year, opting instead for Latin II. My questions are these: Firstly, how negative will this look on my college application? Secondly, if a school claims not to look at Freshman Grades (a la Princeton), do they still look at Freshman courses and fishy freshman course changes (like mine) affect the application negatively. Additionally, as I have the opportunity to take an additional class this year, I was trying to decide between AP Statistics and Greek. I think of myself as somewhat of a classicist, and Greek would be really fun, however Languages aren’t my strong point and it could negatively affect my GPA. Additionally, I think most schools would prefer an easy AP course to a hard non-AP like Greek. Is my assumption correct? And what are the your thoughts on the course decisions I should make? Thanks for the help.</p>
<p>First, don’t worry about your freshman year. If you do extremely well in your subsequent years it won’t matter. Move on.</p>
<p>Second, selective colleges are looking for you to take the more/most rigorous academic program offered at your high school. They are also looking for you to focus on core subjects: english, math, science, history and language. So a balanced approach makes the most sense.</p>
<p>For language, selective colleges would like to see you take 4 years of one language. Switching works poorly because for most students it takes 3-4 years to become reasonably fluent, and the 4th year is especially important because by then you’re well positioned to study the literature of that language. And that is one of the goals of language study.</p>
<p>By jumping around in languages, rather than focusing on one, you weaken your eventual application. More so you’ll personally benefit from a more focused approach.</p>
<p>In terms of which courses to take to make you appealing to selective colleges, I think that it’s the wrong way to think. Focus and master the basics. Don’t take a course because it may make you look good. I doubt that you’ll second guess anyone, and if you stick to the core courses methodologically and in depth you’ll become more of an appealing candidate then by trying to control the application process.</p>
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<p>Bit of a contradiction there lol. </p>
<p>Colleges do know which APs are “lite,” but Language 1 isn’t likely to impress anyone either. If you take Greek your remaining years of high school, that’s another story.</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies. I’m REALLY trying not to be concerned at all about my freshman year (one of my buddies got a 3.1 in his, and just got into Tufts and Haverford), but I have an annoying Type-A personality which makes it difficult to just relax (which again, may seem contrary to my perviously stated poor Freshman Grades). I don’t think that switching to Latin will do any damage to me practically (excluding my application), as our Chinese program is notorious for being EXTREMELY slow and EXTREMELY difficult (that seems contradictory, but the course is near impossible, and yet we never seem to make significant improvement… Perhaps due to the less-than-average instructor). If I stuck with Chinese all through Senior year, I would barely be able to pick paragraphs out of a newspaper, much less actually read Chinese literature. Additionally, even at the highest possible level, it’s not considered an AP course. On the other hand, I studied Latin previously to my highschool, allowing me to skip freshman year, and setting me on course with the rest of my classmates to get into AP Latin IV: Vergil. The only reason I WOULDN’T take Latin is if would do irreparable damage to my Admissions, which, it seems like, it won’t. However, PLEASE feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this point!!!</p>
<p>If you are going to fail chinese for the next 3 years, why would you even consider continuing chinese? Colleges want to see you succeed, with the matter and fashion being left up to you. Colleges would rather see you switch and succeed than stay and fail.</p>