I am applying ED1 to Washu, I have been an A/A- student (with the exception of 1 B+ freshman year) while taking AP stem classes.
WashU asks for applicants to submit 1st quarter grades which has been a cause of concern for me.
My school offers an MV Calc course for those who have completed BC calc. It is taken by 40-50 students every year (800 students class) This class is almost certainly the most difficult offered at my school as it is truly taught at the college level. I received a C+ for MV in the 1st quarter and am worried that this will cause colleges to be concerned that I won’t be able to keep up with college-level math. This is especially concerning since I am applying as a physics major to most of my schools.
Will this have a big effect on my college apps and should I email admissions officers offering an explanation?
Wil previous performance in math classes be enough to counteract this (5 on AP BC Calc)?
First of all, since usually high school students come into college with at most BC AP credits, they will understand taking MV Calculus was going just above and beyond. College students struggle in MV Calculus.
With that said, I don’t think it will negatively affect your admission because it doesn’t seem fair to hold that against you when you took the initiatives to go beyond high school level math. Especially, since your other grades are high, the chance is that they will totally understand you took the challenge of a difficult course even as a senior student (when many other senior students take easy courses in their last year).
They make you submit what courses you took for that reason. The GPA/overall grade is not reflective of how rigorous your courses were, so you’ll be able to appeal to them just by listing your MV Calculus course on Commonapp/transcript. I don’t think you’ll need an additional explanation.
Long story short, it will not have a big effect on your college apps.
Will it have a major impact? No, colleges like to see kids challenge themself so you get points for that. On the other hand there are kids that take classes like this and do well, so you slip in comparison to them.
Two issues here. First, what explanation could you give? Blame the poor teaching of the class? The time you spent on ECs? If there are acceptable reasons such as an illness or death in the family these are best addressed by your GC in their letter; 3rd party comments are given more credit than those of an interested party.
Second, assuming you didn’t have something like an illness or death in the family, then you are worrying about the wrong thing. You should be thinking about why you didn’t do well in this class. Was it not enough time studying, not doing practice problems on your own, failure to ask questions when things weren’t clear, etc? In a year you may be sitting in a similar class in college, except that class will meet fewer hours a week and cover the material at a much faster pace. It is typical for a year-long HS math class to be covered in 15 weeks in college at 3 hours/wk. You are being handed a golden opportunity, a chance to identify problems and work on fixing them before you’re taking classes for keep in college.
Agree with the above. You’re in a class more advanced then a vast majority of applicants, so a slight dip in the grade won’t completely offset that. An A would be better but top performance in BC and then taking MVC with that grade will still net positive over most AB and BC applicants.
Unless there’s some situation you haven’t mentioned, I don’t know what you would “explain” via email.