son17’s report card just came in the mail. Did pretty well! Got all As and A- except for Alg 2 where he finished with a 89.1 and got a B+. Surprisingly pulled an A- in honors Physics. Oh well, 1st B on his end of year transcript thru Jr year, I think that is pretty good. Our school only sends over the final year end grades on our transcripts, I think. They sent us transcripts last year and that’s what it showed. Looks better for my son anyways. His year end GPA is up over last year a teeny bit, so it has gone up every year slightly. Hopefully his class rank will move up a bit now too. He finished well in his business classes so now he qualifies for the school’s National Business Honor Soceity, which doesn’t really mean a whole lot, but might look good when he applies to some Biz schools.
Happy that year is done with!! Hope you all get some nice report cards from your kids too!
@STEM2017 Pretty sure most schools will consider Art History as a Social Studies course.
Compass Prep, yes that’s the one that shot down my last thread of hope months ago! 
@2muchquan Welcome back! As for NMSF, we are proceeding as if D does not make it (she has the predicted cut-off for our state, so too close for any comfort). IIRC, right now there 4 schools on her list that offer big NMF scholarships. 3 of those also have just as large or larger non-NMF scholarships for which D will qualify. So, her list is pretty much a go and we are starting files at 14 of her 15 schools next month by sending in SAT scores. As for the 1 school that is only in play if she makes NMF, we will hold off and see what happens. But in any event, only 1 app will go out before the NMF announcement, and that is because its a simple app and she’s been advised by her admissions counselor for the school to get her app in ASAP once it opens.
** T-4 DAYS ** until the 2017 admissions cycle madness begins!
Hush @itsgettingreal17 
I struggle to keep up with this thread so I’m not sure if it was mentioned but as info University of Virginia essay prompts for this coming year are now available… http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/
** QOTD: ** How does your school report grades on the transcript? By semester or year end only for year-long classes? Just curious to see if schools handle this differently.
D’s school reports grades by each semester.
@itsgettingreal17 My S’s transcript is one yearly grade per class - the other information beside it is how much credit the class was (.5 for semester 1.0 for year long). GPA is also calculated on this one grade.
DD’s transcript has grade for each semester.
As I was trying to answer @itsgettingreal17’s QOTD, I looked up DD’s latest transcript. To my surprise, it lists A/A+/A-'s. Of all these years, I and the kids thought the school only reports letter grades and not +/-'s. Needless to say, DD has several “-'s”! The only saving grace is the school still calculates her GPA and class rank by letter grades only.
@4beardolls Great reminder to everyone to view the transcript before having it sent out. The official transcript may look differently than the unofficial transcript. And there may be errors that should be caught before transcripts are submitted to colleges.
@2muchquan S is just above the Compass Prep range for NMSF in a state that usually has a lower cutoff, but we’re compiling two lists – one that we’ll use if NMSF becomes a reality and one that we’ll use if it doesn’t. There is some overlap, but not much. I think S will be an auto-admit for all schools on both lists (although we haven’t delved into requirements for honors college or direct to major admissions yet), so we will probably limit apps before the cutoff announcement.
@TimEnchanter Will be interesting to hear your impressions of Kentucky. We took our daughter there a couple of weeks ago and she really liked it. Definitely remaining on the list. She wants to be a vet. We got a personal tour of the AG campus by an adviser in that college. And they just opened a new addition/building for their business college so that should be of interest to your daughter. Like a lot of college campuses we have visited, there is a lot of construction (new dorms, academic buildings, student union, etc.).
Northeastern
Along with @flatKansas, I don’t want to hear great things about NEU no matter how true they are. I’ve been trying to get it off the list for months. Great school, but I think it’s a waste of app money for us as they are so selective now. At best I could see D getting into the NU.in program (which we probably can’t afford) with little merit (NPC shows a whopping $6000/year on $44,000 tuition). And it’s not even at the top of her list – #4 below two schools where her chances are way better. I also must admit that I’m not ready for her to live in a big city like Boston. Okay, NEU rant over! 
QOTD
D’s school (as well as S18’s) grade by semester even for full year classes. I prefer this method personally. One area where they seem to differ from most is not giving any pluses or minuses.
@itsgettingreal17, Geesh, thanks for reminding me that I have to start putting some more pressure on D to get going with that essay (and Naviance brag sheet and some ACT prep). Summer goes so fast.
Valuable information on the tax liability for scholarships. It hadn’t even occurred to me so appreciate the tipoff.
Son’s school reports year end grade on the transcript.
@fun1234 I agree with @mommdc and would do the social science but you know your child best and the schools being applied to. With college being so expensive, I feel like ALL colleges have become very selective and are attracting high caliber students. Many of them say on their sites that they recommend 4 years of a subject but require 2. There will be many applicants that have the 4 and to be competitive among the candidates, I read all of the recommends as the minimums jus to be safe and let my son double up on areas where he really wanted to take extra classes in a subject. It’s a tough call though as we wrestled with what to do with AP Calc and AP Stats. Kids should take what interests them and will benefit them but on the other hand we are still trying to keep them competitive…
Supplemental essay updates
Many moons ago a few people recommended the College Essay Organizer site (www.collegeessayorganizer.com) which I’ve found very useful. The free version works fine for me. You can add all your colleges to a list and it shows what (if any) the supplemental prompts are and whether they are updated. I just got an email from them showing which colleges (out of all colleges, not just D’s) have the new prompts out (mostly UC’s). It says that most schools update in July or August, but they’ll be sending a weekly email list.
QOTD
Per semester, +/-. 7th or 8th grade classes that count towards graduation requirements (math or foreign language) show as satisified, yearly, no grades shown unless specifically requested at the end of junior year. +/- actually helps S although there are no A+'s…
NEU looks amazing and I’m not even mentioning it to S. Not affordable and we have enough of those as well.
@2muchquan we’re sort of planning either way with regards to NMF. D17’s two biggest targets if she gets NMF are Bama and Northeastern, but she got a 33 on the ACT so that may be good enough for Bama. I have no confidence at all about all the guessing going on, so we’ll just wait until they come in to pull the trigger on NMF stuff or set it aside and work from a different angle.
I’m currently doing my Surrealism final online. I write really fast (to nobody’s surprise on here, lol) and I’m done, so now I’m just reading until 1:30 when I can submit it and not be obnoxiously ahead of everyone else. The deadline is 1:50. If I never have to discuss Freud’s psychosexual theory again, ever ever ever, I will be so happy. It really kinda ruined the fun of surrealism for me to have it ALL be about the schlong. So tiring, and so wrong and discredited, (but I have to parrot it all back to make the professor happy). Squawk, Polly Wants To Shove The Freudian Cracker back down your throat, squawk!!!..and I’m DONE! 
@RightCoaster I probably should have her look at BU while she’s up there, but if I remember correctly they weren’t as merit money oriented, so I don’t think it’ll be affordable for us. I figure they’ll be in the city for several days, they aren’t dummies, they can certainly poke around Boston with no problem-it’s like sneeze and hit a college there.
QOTD D’s school updates grades by semester. Updated class rank comes out in early September which is so important here in TX.
@snoozn I looked at the college essay organizer today. It looks snazzy. I just wasn’ t ready to look at it back when @2muchquan mentioned it many moons ago. I still can’t decide if I want to pay the extra $50 for the extra service. Did anyone use it and think it was worth the money?
To add to @snoozn’s post, if you are using the free version of College Essay Organizer, and have a Gmail account you are using for your signup, you can create multiple accounts using the same email address (since they do not let you ‘remove’ schools from your list…which may or may not be a big deal to you). So instead of using separate email addresses, you can do something like the following to create 3 accounts:
MyEmailAddress@ gmail.com
My.EmailAddress@ gmail.com
My.Email.Address@ gmail.com
Emails to the above addresses all just go to MyEmailAddress @gmail.com (ignore the space, I only added it b/c I wasn’t sure what CC would do to the address).
Some sites won’t allow these variations, but I found that (for now) College Essay Organizer treats them all as different addresses, allowing you to change your list, or keep multiple lists…using the same email address.
QOTD
D school reports by semester, including +/-. However, the + and - don’t factor into the GPA, i.e. A+ = A = A- all have the same GPA points.
School doesn’t rank. The school used to list percentile bands, (I always called that pseudo-ranking), but now only lists the highest possible and highest attained weighted and unweighted GPAs.
What about if my son kind of waits and sees what happens and I guess if he gets deferred he could add it to his spring semester and take it at the community college if it is offered and send it to them that he has added it. College applications will pretty much be done and it will almost be the end of the 1 st semester. The weight though would be like possibly a regular class. He does want to do dental shadowing so I just don’t know if there is time. I hope the guidance can shed some light on this matter. My son tried to make an appointment with the college placement, but they said your not allowed another appointment until everyone gets one.