Poor Grades Essay

If you have received a less than stellar grade, you might be wondering how you should address it on your college application.

If you have received a less than stellar grade, you might be wondering how you should address it on your college application.If it’s on your transcript, it’s something that you definitely can’t hide. In this post we’ll discuss the various scenarios in which you might explain a bad grade, and how you can go about doing so.

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It’s important to remember that admissions committees literally see thousands of applications and they are familiar with a broad variety of personal circumstances.

If your circumstances are not likely to stand out as extenuating or unusual, there’s no need to explain a bad grade.

If you get perfect grades during freshman year and then get sick during your sophomore year and get all Cs during the second semester, you’ll only be able to explain them if your grades go back up after your illness passes.

If your blemish falls towards the end of your transcript and you don’t have time for it to reflect an improvement, you might even explain that you are now back on track and that the admissions committee can expect to see improvement on your second semester grades.

Don’t use your personal essay to explain a bad grade unless there is another reason for doing so.

For example, if you experienced a traumatic car accident during your junior year and your grades suffered because of it, you should only discuss it in your personal statement if it was also personally significant in other ways.Ask a trusted teacher, guidance counselor, or another mentor for their perspective, or consider College Vine’s Kate Koch-Sundquist is a graduate of Pomona College where she studied sociology, psychology, and writing before going on to receive an M. Even the brightest students can sometimes find themselves academically underperforming, often through no fault of their own.If the answer to any of these questions is no, think carefully before explaining the blemish on your transcript.You may want to discuss your decision with a guidance counselor or teacher first to gain some more perspective.If you have received a series of grades in the range of B- and C , explaining a C or a C- won’t affect your application much.Instead, the bad grade or grades need to significantly differ from the grades you normally achieve.If you are used to getting all Bs, but then get the flu and get an B- in geometry your sophomore year, the admissions committee probably doesn’t need to hear about it.After all, the grade is not much different from your usual performance, and getting the flu isn’t exactly a unique scenario to face in high school.Rather than trying to explain it, you should let your performance speak for itself and work extra hard to hit higher grades during your senior year.Similarly, there’s no reason to explain grades that aren’t significantly different from your normal achievements.