You need a consistent and believable story and one that takes accountability for your grades. If you are intelligent enough to score as high as you did on the standardized tests and do as well as you did on your ECs and garner the respect from others that you did, then it would seem you are intelligent and resourceful enough to not have your grades be impacted by “bad teachers.” But they were….why? Was there more than bad teachers at play…twice exceptional which would account for the spelling errors, poverty, adhd, language issues, trauma, abuse, mental health issues, boredom, drugs, bullying? overwhelming responsibilities in the home? Dig deep for the answer. And then also dig deep to figure out what exactly you need and how you can avoid that happening to you in college and in life. You will always encounter bad teachers, bad bosses, bad people for you. How can you be resourceful and resilient enough to not be impacted negatively by those bad apples. You figured this out already outside of the classroom obviously, but not in the classroom. Why? Tell your story both how and why you were impacted and how and why you won’t be in the future. This is the story you need to understand and to tell. In my opinion.
I don’t think a 3.83 is so bad, but I do not see how you get there without including many non-core classes.
At the risk of repeating much that has already been said…
I do not think that you are fully understanding the level of student who typically apply to “top 20” universities. “Approximately 9 B’s” is going to be very rare amongst applications to top 10 or even top 20 universities. Straight A’s are more common. There are applicants to MIT who feel a bit bad about the “low A+” that they once got in a high school math class (eg trigonometry) rather than their normal “high A+” grade.
And students are going to have a bad teacher at some point. We put in whatever effort is needed to recover from it. I have definitely had a bad professor, even at a “top 10” university.
I do not know whether you are really safe for admissions for US Merced regardless of whether you specifically apply to it. Otherwise, from the list discussed in this thread I think that no acceptances is a very real possibility. California has very good community colleges and very well defined ways to transfer from the community colleges to a CSU or a UC. You should be aware that this is a very real possibility if you don’t get into Merced, assuming that you do not add safeties to your list.
I was a math major. I agree that for someone who is strong in math and who is very well prepared, calculus is really not difficult. However, calculus is very, very, very useful for a lot that is going to be coming in the future. Multi-variate calculus is also something that I have used on the job quite a few times. This is something that is worth taking the time to learn well.
And there will be a point when math gets difficult. For some of us this is also the point where it gets interesting. However, there are plenty of math majors at MIT or Stanford or Caltech who need to learn study skills in a hurry because they never needed good study skills when they were in high school.
As a military parent, who’s moved a LOT and been involved in every type of school from public to charter to private, we have a broad and in-depth overview of grading. I think grades are kind of BS honestly, and the difference b/w an A student and a B student are often chalked up to kids who are teachers’ favorites. Schools are also passing out A’s like M&Ms because students getting into better colleges increases THEIR visibility & bring in more funding, among other reasons. Sure every school has that handful of kids who work their asses off, but then right next to them are kids who get As bc they are suckups or their parents donate a lot to the school. You can also have two teachers who teach the same subject and one grades much harsher than the other. It’s ridiculous how subjective it is.
Just curious. How does getting more kids into college increase a high school’s funding?
If you don’t understand the economics of private school funding, I can’t help you.
Well, you could. . . But you just don’t want to.
But at least I now know that you’re talking about private schools. You didn’t make that clear in your earlier post.
BTW, what’s with the anger?
Please take the back and forth conversation to PM. Thank you for your understanding!
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