I am currently a dual-enrolled high school student. I will earn my associate’s degree from my local community college at the same time that I will earn my high school diploma from my high school.
I am going to attend New College of Florida in August 2015 to earn my bachelor’s degree. I’ll technically enter as a freshman for the purposes of financial aid and what-not, but I will be coming in with a full transcript of college classes since I will already have my associate’s degree.
It is my understanding that my grades from my community colleges classes will not make their way onto my New College of Florida transcripts. However, when I am applying to graduate school, which transcripts will the grad school admissions want to see? Basically my question is this: I want to completely start over when I start my new college; allow my transcripts/GPA to be a fresh slate. I don’t want to let grad schools see my grades that I earned while working towards my associate’s degree.
They will want the transcripts from your associate degree, though most programs will likely heavily weight their opinion on the last 60 or so hours of your transcripts. That means in most cases those older credits won’t be as damaging if they aren’t as good as the more recent credits.
Why would you not want your grad schools to see your associate’s degree classes?
There’s really no such thing as a “fresh slate” from here on out - in life in general. Your future decisions and choices will be determined, at least in part, by your past performance. So most grad schools are going to want to see those credits from your associate’s degree. (There are some graduate schools that will say that they don’t care about the grades from dual-enrollment programs in high school, so you may skip it there. But most grad schools say they want to see transcripts from all institutes of higher ed attended.)
I just was hoping to start over. I’ve gotten a few B’s and two C’s in my dual-enrollment classes. I was hoping to go to college and get only A’s, as this would be more desirable for prestigious grad schools.
They will want to see everything but will put more weight on your last few years. You can mitigate your Bs and Cs somewhat by doing well after you transfer. And, the word “prestigious” is not as clear cut as you might think so don’t worry about it right now. once you are close to graduation, you will have a much better idea of what kind of graduate school you wish to attend and it may not be what you now consider to be prestigious…
Great grades in your last two years of college and great GRE scores will more than offset any Cs in your associate degree program for many graduate programs, although perhaps someone here will say that law schools or medical schools might care about the earlier grades.