<p>If you are, say a hot basketball recruit for Duke, or other highly desired athlete, or if your father has been donating millions to the college over time and is working out a deal for some endowment funds at some school, or if you are a severely challenged student who has lived in a cardboard box and whose parents were both incarcerated; those things might do it. Or if you published a novel is well acclaimed, became a national or international celebrity. An F in precalc just might be overlooked. But if there are stacks of kids just like you that the school is trying to decide who to cull, yes, the F is going to be an easy out. Even with a retake in summer school, even with some mealy explanation about some teacher that wasn’t very good. If the school takes action and makes the teacher change the grade, that would work, but if the issue is not so flagrant that your grade stays, then you have the problem. Not everyone in your class flunked that course, I dare say. </p>
<p>GPAs are generally converted to an unwieghted standard and with a 4.0 being a perfect, the conversions certainly are not going to give you that. </p>
<p>If you want to give it a go, do apply to the schools you most want, but understand that your chances of acceptance have dropped drastically, and make sure you also spend some extra time looking for some college where you would have a realistic chance of acceptance. If you focus on such a college search, it could be the benefit of what happened, because, frankly, even without a failing grade, your chances were not way up there for acceptances at those schools. What are your ACT/SAT test scores? THose scores can up your chances at a number of schools that are not as highly selective as what you have listed, but are still considered top notch. Remember there are about 3000 colleges in this country, and you certainly can find a top 10% school that is very likely to take you. But when you are talking the top 1%, it gets filter gets very fine. To the point where “perfect” applicants are often turned away for no discernable reason. And many of them did not take the time to do more than cherry pick name schools. The time you spend in finding good schools that are not so well known that the line to get into them has 10x the seats available, is something too few students bother to take and many are hit between the eyes when they don’t get into what they thought were likely choices. Start looking at some school like University of Denver, Marquette, Rollins, all very good schools without the name recognition and without such heavy competition for admissions. Might get some merit money too. A lot of high stat kids end up at a safety they just tacked onto their list. You KNOW you have an issue and that the likelihood is not there for the most selective schools, so you can start working on a list of schools that will likely take you despite this issue and can meet your other requirements. If one of those requirements is that they don’t take kids with an issue like yours…well, that’s a problem. You’ve just eliminated yourself.</p>