<p>I’m an international student applying to colleges in the U.S. I’m not applying to the Ivy League or any of their peers (unlike many on these boards). I’m applying to a broad range of schools, of which Williams College is by far the most selective. The rest of my target colleges accept about 30% or 40% of applicants and their middle 50% on the SAT ends at around 700.</p>
<p>One of my safety schools (a lower tier private college, not selective) offers a full scholarship guarantee to students with a certain GPA and SAT/ACT score. I have fulfilled the test score requirement already and my GPA from 10th grade and up is at 4.0.</p>
<p>However, I had several B’s in my freshman year of high school. My school system does not consider 9th grade in our graduation program so those B’s will not be on my transcript. The reason why 9th grade marks are not shown is because they’re not used for graduation credit whatsoever. I called my safety school and asked if my transcript would be accepted. They said they would have a chat with my counselor (probably means they’ll ask for the grades).</p>
<p>I’m hoping that my counselor will convince them to take my GPA from grade 10 and up but in the event that they demand my freshman year grades, my GPA will probably drop to below the requirement for a full scholarship.</p>
<p>I have some options:</p>
<p>1) Get my counselor to convince the school that freshman year should be disregarded when they call to ask. This may not work and they might just ask for the grades. I could write them a letter to convince them to forget about those grades (after all, even schools like Princeton don’t use 9th grade marks for GPA calculation) but this might not work either.</p>
<p>2) I could retake those classes online and get them over with quite fast. The problem with this is that my transcript will show that I completed those courses quite late (during junior year). This would be quite weird… It would basically show that I completed 11th grade Social Studies before 9th grade Social Studies. There is usually no evidence left if you take (or retake) a course online but this is not the case in my situation due to this awkward timing issue (transcripts show the month and year in which you finished each course).</p>
<p>What should I do? It’s very likely that I will accept this full scholarship to this lower tier college if I am offered it.</p>