Senior Year: First Quarter Grades & Admissions Influence

Applying to College
1

Hi!

As a student who struggled in some of my Science and Math courses in grades 9 and 10 before finding my footing in Junior year, I’m wondering about the impact my Q1 grades will have on admissions now.

I got pretty consistent Bs in Honors Science/Math classes the first two years and got them up to As my Junior year in AP classes.

This year, I happen to be doing much better, even with a full AP course load. I’m thinking I’ll close out Q1 with nearly all A+s and maybe one A.

GPA dipped Sophomore year and then was up Junior year. I predict it’ll go up this year.

Generally speaking, how influential will my (hopefully) good Q1 grades be in admissions decisions?

2

Not much for most. Here are the possibilities:

  1. For regular admission, a large number of colleges that make decisons after January require you to submit first semester grades after applying and decisons are made using those grades along with those through junior year. Thus, your quarter grades will be meaningless in that situation but of course your semester grades will be important.
  2. There are then a large number of colleges, including majority of public universities, that make regular admission decisions (and, if they have it, early action or early decison decisions) using only grades through junior year, and then senior year grades are used to determine if any admission offered should be withdrawn. For those your first quarter grades will also be of little to no importance.
  3. Many of the colleges from group 1 above have early action and early decision, where you can get a decision of admit, deny, or deferred to regular admission in mid-Dec or some other date designated for early decisions. Many of those decisions are made using grades only through junior year, but some of those colleges actually require you to submit a report of quarter grades, and those grades will be considered, although in the usual case it is more to see if you are getting worse than your junior grades, and thus may be rejected for EA or ED as a result, rather than to see if already weak grades through junior year are getting better, but it is a possibility.