I was wondering if colleges care about grades in PE and other nonacademic classes. I got an A- and wanted to know if colleges (ex: Stanford) would recalculate my GPA without this. And does Stanford care about my freshman year of high school or not?
Applicants that are competitive for top schools have similar stats in these types of courses, anyway, so it would be a waste of their time to factor them out. At any rate, performance in “non-academic” courses does say something about an applicant. Top schools care if you slack off in Life Skills or Aerobics. They care if your elephant lamp doesn’t light up when you pull its trunk, and you fail Shop and get sent to all-day detention.
On the other hand, if A’s (good performance) in “non-academic” courses result in a substantially elevated GPA for a student, that points to B’s or C’s in the “academic” courses, which the top schools frown upon. Point being, if you’re worried about an A- in PE artificially raising your GPA, then you might have a problem gaining the interest of Stanford.
Freshman year grades/rigor are important, but your later work will be more important.
Re PE: no, not in the least.
I think in the past Stanford did not consider freshman grades but they’ve removed that from their web site and specifically state they want 9-11 grades. Generally colleges will pay limited attention to non-academic grades. And an A- will NOT kill you. Chill out.