What's more important? Weighted vs. Unweighted GPA

sadoian
Sun, 15 Jan 2006 00:20:02 +0000

Always faithful, I wouldn’t be worrying too much about an A- on a progress report. They’re mainly looking at the overall picture, and not scrutinizing over little details like that. If they did, it would take way too long to go through the 10,000+ applications they receive every year.

For applicants, I was in your shoes a couple months ago. Just stay calm and don’t worry about it. The worst thing you can do (already mentioned) is to show MIT that all you care about is school and you have no life outside of the classroom. Show some diverse interests, an out-of-school project, etc, and I’m sure the adcoms will ‘forgive’ your B.

If grades were the sole factor in getting into college, I can pretty confidently say that a lot of people that are at the Ivy Leagues and other top colleges wouldn’t be there, period. Grades only make up part of a large picture of each application.

So worry not, and present yourself as a strong candidate in other areas, too! (By the way, having a few B’s shouldn’t be anything to stress over, top decile is great - congratulations! Think about it… you’re doing better than at least 90% of your peers… that’s an “A” in itself.)

-Jared