The first thing colleges look at when they process your application is your grades. As we’ve said before, and will likely say again, high grades alone cannot get you into a top college, but a lack of high grades can certainly derail your efforts. After all, college is a lot of work, and colleges want to admit students who are equal to that challenge. If you struggled in high school, they may be wary about your chances of taking on the advanced work they offer.
What then, should you do if your grades are less than perfect, a B slipping in here or there, or even a B+ average? Does this mean your odds of attending an elite college are totally shot? This is a complicated question, and as in so many aspects of college applications, has a complicated answer. Let’s explore it together!
How Colleges Evaluate Your Grades
When top colleges review your transcript, they do so holistically. This means that they don’t just look at the grades you got and your overall GPA, but that they examine you in context, putting your performance into the circumstances of your high school. This is very necessary; not every high school grades the same, offers the same classes, or has the same difficulty. There is no fair way to compare grades between schools without taking this context into account.
In addition to this, colleges examine personal context. If you were dealing with illness, or injury, or other personal circumstances which impacted your schooling, colleges will take that into consideration. It does not absolve you from the need to get high grades of course, but it can soften the blow in some cases. We discuss this more in our article on the additional information section, which is where you tell colleges about these circumstances.
Your grades do not need to be perfect, just good enough, and in many cases a B+ average is good enough. The real rub, the real issue, is that so many students apply who are better than good enough, with perfect grades, even taking context into account. The rest of this article, therefore, will go into how you can impress admissions officers beyond grades alone.
How to Impress Colleges Beyond Grades
Grades are, of course, not the only thing colleges look at when they evaluate your application. It is therefore in these other areas where you can, and indeed must, impress admissions officers. We’ll go through the various pathways of doing so, and how each can weigh upon your application.
Standardized Tests
Your grades are only part of the story colleges look at when evaluating your academic fitness. Standardized test scores are another important benchmark, especially with how variable different high schools can be in difficulty and grading policies. Now, high test scores alone will not make up for lower than excellent grades, but they can cause admissions officers to be more willing to extend the benefit of the donut to applicants, especially if the rest of an application is stellar.
Being a Recruited Athlete
There is a common trope that top athletes can get into any college they want regardless of the grades they have. This is an exaggeration, but many athletes do receive more leeway in their academic performance than other students. Unfortunately, being a recruited athlete is not something that’s easy to just do; if you are an excellent athlete then you may look into this, but most students will need to pursue other potential avenues.
Demonstrating Intellectual Vitality
There are ways to show your interest in and devotion to academic subjects beyond just good grades in classes, and if your extracurriculars are full of these, and you excel in them, then colleges take note. This can take different forms in practice, but the end result is the same: that you actively pursued your academic interests outside of the classroom, and followed that to the highest levels.
Colleges want students who are intellectually curious and who are eager to explore their academic interests. After all, being on the cutting edge of research, following the answers to wherever they lead, is what colleges are for. If you can demonstrate that you’ve done this already outside the classroom, admissions officers may have more leeway with your performance in the classroom.
Letters of Recommendation
Almost everything in your application is generated by you, but letters of recommendation from your teachers provide some very important and much needed context to admissions officers. These are especially important for students who may not have the best grades, as your teachers can speak to your effort, your participation in class, and your presence in the classroom.
Of course, you must first be an excellent student to get the kind of letter of recommendation you need, but these letters can seriously bolster your profile, and help contextualize your grades. If you show dedication and effort in your classes, and work hard to both grasp the material and turn in quality work, then the letters of recommendation you get will make admissions officers more comfortable with admitting you, knowing that you are equipped to handle the rigors of college.
Building a College List as a B Student
Building a suitable college list depends on the confluence of two factors. The first is, of course, which schools you like and are suitable for you, and the second are the schools your profile suggests you have a good shot at getting into. We are optimists, and work hard with our students to get into all the colleges on their list, but we like to be realistic as well. Not all colleges are going to be suitable for every student.
For B students, most of the Ivy League and Ivy+ schools are going to be out of reach without serious compelling factors elsewhere in your application. This does not mean that all great schools are out of reach, merely that the already very low acceptance rates at these schools make your chances even worse.
We advise B students to aim for more second tier universities as their reach schools; Duke and NYU, Tufts and Tulane. These are still excellent schools, with national reputations and incredible offerings, but aren’t quite so competitive, and with slightly better acceptance odds. You can still have the most competitive schools on your list, but our goal is to manage risk in such a way that students get into the best colleges possible.
Building Candidacy as a B Student
As we have discussed throughout this article, without perfect grades, the rest of your application needs to be that much more exemplary. If you are coming at this as a student in ninth grade, then you should, of course, try to be an A student. We’re therefore going to assume that you’re coming to this article in junior year or later, and need some advice on approaching college applications with what you already have, and making the most of it.
Last Minute Capstones
Capstone projects are culminations of earlier effort, a final crowning achievement that lets students show off the full extent of their talents and abilities. These do often have to be built to over time, but there are some you can do quickly, if you’re willing to put in a lot of time and effort. Getting an interesting internship, putting out some very useful code on GitHub, or submitting original research for publication can all theoretically be done over the summer before your senior year of high school (though probably not all three at once).
The first step is to evaluate what you’ve done before, the skills and involvements you already have extracurricularly, and how you can take those to the next level. Do you have an interest in programming and volunteer for a nonprofit? Offer to help with their tech stack, or code an app to improve their internal processes. The specifics of what you do matter less than the work you put in and the benefit you bring as a result of your actions.
Work With Authenticity
Do not go out and join a bunch of clubs at the last minute to try and fill space on your resume. A serious dedication to a single activity matters more, and is more impactful. Plus, admissions officers are relatively good at what they do; if they see you just going out and joining a bunch of clubs at the last minute, they’re going to assume you’re doing so cynically to pad your resume, rather than from any deep interest in the subjects you are exploring.
Instead, you should work to heighten the connection and involvement with any groups you are currently engaged with. Take your internship to the next level. Take on more responsibilities as a volunteer. If you’re in sports, try coaching for or reffing for younger leagues, passing on the skills you worked hard to master.
Ace Your Standardized Tests
There’s not a lot you can do at the last minute to boost your grades; the past happened, and is rather set. There is still time to do quite well on your standardized tests however, and impress colleges in that way. If you are looking for help with your test prep journey, then Ivy Scholars can help; check out our test prep coaching program to see how our students improve by an average of 170 points.
Senior Year Grades Matter (Somewhat)
Finally, you do want to do as well as possible in your senior year. There are some schools who don’t count senior year grades at all (notably the UC system), but most will check them, and do think highly of improvement over time. If you have been taking the hardest possible classes this whole time, and are doing better now at the tail end of high school, colleges are more likely to think that’s a positive sign for your future performance.
Final Thoughts
Getting into a top college is really hard, and having less than perfect grades can make that feel impossible. We don’t want to give the impression it’s easy (because applying to these schools is never a sure thing), but your situation may not be as hopeless as you fear. We hope this article has given you insight into how colleges really think about grades, and how this may impact your own applications.
If you’re looking for help aligning your own applications with what these schools want, or hammering out some last-minute candidacy building efforts, then Ivy Scholars can help. Our mentors are skilled at working with students regardless of where they stand now, and at helping you find the colleges which will best support your needs and goals. Schedule a free consultation to learn more, we always love hearing from you.
