Help with Graduate school admissions?

ugradengg
Sun, 28 Sep 2014 18:43:04 +0000

Hello everyone,

I was hoping one of you would be able to help me with something thats been stressing me out lately. I’m planning on applying to graduate schools and I need some advice on how they view grade replacement/forgiveness in calculating someones GPA. Heres my story in more detail:

I had a really bad freeman year that resulted in an F and a D. Luckily my school had a grade replacement policy that allowed me to retake those two courses again and have the original grades replaced by the new ones ( I got two Bs the second time). All of the grades were mentioned on my transcript with an asterisk next to the F and D noting that they’ve been substituted.

I graduated form my school with a 3.06 cumulative GPA (this is the GPA that my college transcript lists). But now I’m worried about how grad schools will view that GPA. Will they accept the GPA that my college reports to them or will they recalculate it based on the removed grades?

If they do recalculate it, how do they go about it? Will they treat the classes ( the F,D,B and B ) as four separate classes or will they average the grades I received in each class and only count it as two classes ( i.e. count (F+B)/2 and (D+B)/2 as two classes).

I’m sure you guys know that 99% of grad schools require at least a 3.0 to be considered so whether or not they recalculate it ( and the way in which they do) could be be the difference between me being able to apply to schools and not meeting the cutoff. I’ve looked around websites of different schools but haven’t been able to find anything about how grad school admission committees view replaced grades. Most schools I’ve looked a have a grade replacement policy for enrolled undergraduate students (and grad students) though. I’d really appreciate any advice anyone could give me.

Thanks!

Edit: I realise that a 3.06 is a low GPA for grad schools anyway but I think that the rest of my profile is strong enough to at least be considered. I have GRE scores of 164 Q, 169 V and 5 AW and research experience. My last two year’s GPA is also significantly better (3.4-3.5). I also went to a pretty tough school where my puny 3.06 was enough to get me on the Dean’s List.