Im an international freshman at one of the top prestigious USA boarding schools and got a gpa of 2.5 my second term. My extracurriculars are really good. If I continue upwards and make a huge positive change, will the 2.5 hurt my chance for ivys?
Yes, it will hurt your chances signficantly. It’s important for you to build a school list with varying levels of selectivity, because ivy’s are not really a possible option at this point.
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Right now I think that you should be focusing on getting ahead in your course work and improving your grades. If you can significantly improve your grades from now on, that would help you a lot for university admissions in the future.
How you do in your classes will be more important compared to how you do in extracurricular activities. To some extent ECs are how the very most selective universities differentiate between a long list of applicants with nearly perfect grades.
You can worry about which universities to apply to at some point in the future.
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Unnecessarily harsh. We know nothing about the OP except a 9th grade semester’s grades. The Ivies consider much more than grades alone. So none of us can definitively say whether the OP has a shot at the Ivies.
That said, OP, virtually no one has a good shot at the Ivies! @Ae1231’s advice to have a balanced list of college applications is good. However it is WAY too soon to start worrying about college. Your boarding school will set you up to succeed in college, and will help you find the right school for you. Hang in there, adjusting to boarding school, and a new country is a lot to handle.
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Thank you. Rereading now and it came across a lot harsher than I intended. Very sorry!!
OP:
Yes, this will hurt your chances, but colleges do value upward trends in grades, so that is something to consider and strive for. It might be ok to have a 2.5 once, but it is very unlikely they will forgive it again. Your chances are very low at ivy’s, just like everyone else so making a very balanced school list is critical. But it’s too early right now. Come back in summer between somphmore and junior year and everyone here will be happy to match you to certain schools based on your preferences and get you roughly chanced for them. For now, focus on your grades and stay involved in EC’s. Your future self will thank you. Good luck!!
It’s not good, but yes, you can overcome it. Seen in a context of straight A’s sophomore and junior years, it won’t hurt you that much. It all depends upon what you do going forward.
Are you on a trimester system? It’s only March - if you’re on a semester system, you’ve still got half a semester to pull your grades up.
Many colleges don’t consider freshman year grades. And most BS do not rank students, so if your school doesn’t, it won’t matter.
Figure out what you need to do to improve and keep putting one foot in front of the other.
There are so many excellent colleges, and they cater to different kinds of students. There will be a good fit for you. Please don’t miss out on your present experience by making it all about the future. To be at a BS is an incredible opportunity and privilege – make the most of it.
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Besides some schools in California, what colleges do not consider freshman grades?
Emory
In addition to comments from others, hard to know whether it will impact your chances. For example, if you have extenuating circumstances such as a death in the family, overcoming a significant challenge, etc. and then make straight As from here on out, I would think you’d still have as much of a chance as most.
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Most of them. They’ll see them, but really care more about how you move on from there. Correcting course after a rocky start is a positive.
Your CC at BS can tell you how the colleges on your list will see your transcript. (Ours was very accurate in her predictions. )
At our school, students were encouraged to put themselves out there freshman year because the downside of a miscalculation was low.
Was it your 1st semester ? Do you know why you got a 2.5 (ie., language issues? Didn’t apply yourself? Didn’t know what was expected? Huge step up academically compared to previous school? Wrong course placement? Undiagnosed ADD?)
Because US GPAs are cumulative, it’ll be very hard to come back from a 2.5 and have a 3.75 by the end of Junior year. It would mean that each semester beside that one would have to be a 4.0 and that’s almost impossible at a top boarding school.
That being said freshman year counts the least in top schools’ evaluation. So hopefully you know what happened, found a way to course-correct, and are okay now.
And you definitely shouldn’t stay up and stress yourself about it. Ivy+ universities are a crapshoot so even with perfect grades odds are high that you wouldn’t get in (like anyone). You can talk with your college counselor and see what they tell you wrt to Ivy+/NESCAC admissions, where students with a 3.5 GPA have good odds, etc.
Ivies are reaches for everyone and the hardest colleges to find are safeties and likelies. Anyone can have dream colleges - finding safeties/likelies is the real work.
We also don’t know what the grading scale at this student’s school is.
While 2.5 is certainly not top of the class, 3.75 may be. Some of these schools are reluctant to let students feel they don’t still have room for improvement!
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