Will a bad GPA ruin my chances here?

chaosakita
Fri, 09 Sep 2011 18:33:38 +0000

mom2012and14:

If you want a spot at Tepper-- do well on your Math SAT II to balance out the 3 on the AP Calc. If you dropped the class midyear, then the class isn’t even on your transcript-- so it will look like you “self studied” for the exam. You should jot a note somewhere in your common ap or have your GC state that the school required you to take the exam. And for goodness sakes, please don’t tell any Adcom in writing, on an application or an interview that your “parents made you blah blah blah” - doesn’t look good for lots of reasons which we will not dwell on. If you need to explain why you dropped the course-- just say you had to drop the class and you are retaking it this year (and hopefully your mid-year calc grade will be an A-- which will vindicate the junior year math stuff). Sorry- Tepper is quantitative and you need to have the stuff on paper to show you can hack it.



This reply is just as confounding as fineartsmom’s.

First of all, the class is still on my transcript. I received a copy, and the class still counts towards my GPA .

Why would I say that the school required me to take the exam? My principal wouldn’t let me take it in the first place, actually, and it took a bit of a hassle to get him to let me.

Getting an A on that Calc class is a miracle. Believe me, that class is genuinely tough, and it’s something that very few of our top math students can do. (However, if I lived a couple of miles over, I probably could’ve gotten an A in our neighboring schools’ calculus AB class). I’m confounded by what made you think I was retaking the class anyways, because I explicitly stated I was taking Stats AP this year, which I guess isn’t a “real” math.

I never indicated that I wanted to go to Tepper. In fact, just like with saying I was taking AP Stats, I said that I wanted HSS. Tepper doesn’t seem to even offer an undergraduate economics degree.