My School Counselor knows I’m at the top of my class, and that I just messed up this one year. She approached me and said “You have a really good chance. Do you want me to mention something about your eleventh grades on my report/LoR?”
She also hinted I could lie about it - make up a great reason, which is believable.
To be honest, I do have a reason. I really felt that there was no point to what I was studying and things seemed unmotivating as hell. I’m an international, and my school is crazy. I focused on a lot of ECs, and did what I loved for a while.
The average in my grade 11 was 62, I got 72. In my first and second term, I was pretty much above average.
Your school counselor should be fired. She is not professional and if you follow her advice you will be in trouble eventually if you manage to get admitted to any American university.
Out of curiosity, what do college counselors even expect as an excuse? When EmmaET says ‘something believable’ we can definitely rule out ‘death’ or 'disease or ‘depression’. That doesn’t leave much else that will completely redeem her.
In college, students with and without disabilities must meet all admissions criteria. Consequently, even a documented disability does not relieve you of the obligation to meet academic requirements during application.
Further, you very rarely disclose disability at admissions. If you had a rocky 11th grade year attributing poor grades to a disability would not serve you and may even be more troubling to admissions than a temporary loss of academic interest. Instead, one year of poor grades tied to disability would lead admissions to wonder if that disability might recur during college and lead to another academic decline. Don’t go there because you have raised a potential academic decline to something documented. Plus, since you voluntarily raised disability, you would have forfeited rights as a student with a disability. Further, disabilities such as depression are episodic rather than something like severe flu that likely happens only once. Just own your relatively poor performance in junior year. Actions often have consequences that must be accepted, but should not be repeated.
Your best rationale for poor grades is truth about why that happened.