Throughout the four years of high school the freshmen grow taller, the classes get harder, and the grades aren’t unswerving A’s. Which is why leading up to senior year, students begin to realize that college is right around the corner, and what they’ve been doing in school really does matter. Some students start high school knowing the importance of every grade.
And then there are students like senior Nate Druckerman. “I used to think that school was just a general waste of time,” Druckerman said. Even with the extra points added to his GPA from his three honors courses and pre-AP, Druckerman’s weighted GPA his freshman year was a 3.4.
“The summer between sophomore and junior year was when I realized that slacking off has irreversibly killed my GPA,” Druckerman said, “without freshman and sophomore years my GPA would be approximately .3 higher. This severely limits what colleges I can reasonably apply to.”
Druckerman has been working hard at making an academic comeback, but it hasn’t been easy. Taking a combined 10 AP courses his junior and senior years, in addition to a post-AP course, Druckerman continues to pick up his underclassman slack with the arguably tougher course load. Counselor Julie McGreevy stated that cases like Druckerman’s are “not uncommon.” She has seen her fair share of students who curtail their GPA’s freshman and sophomore year then realize they need to get their act together. “Just because you’ve had a bad freshman year doesn’t mean you’ve blown your chances of getting into college,” McGreevy said.
Andrew Flaggel, Dean of Admissions at George Mason University, affirmed that a student that has slacked off in their early years of high school can still be evenly evaluated with those who didn’t. “Colleges really understand course loads and patterns. Assuming comparable rigor, more recent grades are better examples of future academic performance. Slacking off based on a mistaken belief that admissions offices won’t notice, including senior year after the point of admission, is a really bad idea,” Flaggel said.
Even so, come admission time, colleges see the overall GPA for each year in addition to a cumulative grade for all four years. So for those underclassmen that have yet to realize slacking off will only hurt their chances of admittance come spring of their senior year, take Druckerman’s advice: “Freshman and sophomore years are the two easiest years of your high school career, guaranteed. Passing on these easy GPA boosters will certainly haunt you come application time.”