Transcript and Course Selection for College Admission

TLDR

• Your transcript is what counts: ensure it properly represents the academic work you have done.
• Your final transcript should show 4 years’ worth of each of: English, Math, Science, Social Studies, and Another Language.
• You should prefer rigorous courses—look for AP, IB, or Dual-Enrollment, especially for your personal focus—while maintaining grades of B or better.
• Classes you take with friends will seem easier. 
• Make a point of being extra-engaged with a couple of your college prep courses Junior year: you will need recommendations from teachers and those teachers will need positive stories to tell about you.

Your raw materials

The advice on how to plan a high school class schedule that maximizes college readiness is very consistent (and easily cross-referenced).

You should plan to take 4 years each of these college-preparatory courses:

• English, covering both writing and literature.
• Math, including algebra, geometry, and probably statistics and pre-calculus. Calculus is nice but colleges know that it is not widely available.
• Science, including a year each of biology, chemistry, physics. Canadian universities are reported to expect a second year of any of those core three. 🇨🇦
• Social Studies, including courses like history, economics, government, global studies, and psychology.
• World Language, any non-English. Canada is legally bilingual (English and French) if you need help choosing a language. 🇨🇦

You may not need all of this for where you end up going to college, but taking this full core curriculum will maximize your options as you begin your college search.

Your school or state is likely to have additional other requirements (like a physical education requirement and a life skills requirement, here are Oregon’s requirements) so it is important that you meet with your counselor to confirm that you are on-track for graduation as part of your course-selection process. You should also take that opportunity to get a copy of your transcript and confirm the accuracy of its contents.

Note: University of California universities have specific course requirements, most notably ⚠️1 year of “Dance, Music, Theater, Visual Arts.”⚠️ See the UC-specific note at the bottom of this post if you intend to apply to any of those universities.

Once your core and required courses are on your transcript, everything else should be feeding your personal narrative: be ready to explain why you are making the choices you’re making—there’s even an Additional Information section (discussed at length here) so you can be more forward about any obvious anomalies. And yes, helping you develop winning explanations/rationalizations for your choices is the fun part of my job.

What do admissions folks see?

Admissions officers expect to have your School Profile when they review your transcript, showing them the relative rigor of your studies versus the academic opportunities you did not pursue. School profiles can be messy, out-of-date, inconsistent, or non-existent, but if you can get yours from your counselor (or maybe a Vice Principal?) you will have far more insight into how a college is going to be evaluating your performance.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that the admissions folks are looking for good or improving grades. If you have a drop in your grades because of an overwhelming external event (ex: “the drop in my GPA coincides with mom’s cancer diagnosis”) then use the Additional Information section of the application to explain that. Admissions readers want to focus your highlights and successes; your ability to frame bad things as what you’ve persevered through and overcome can get them past imperfections on your transcript.

The Your College-Bound Kid podcast did a mock-admissions screening (similar to one I participated in back in 2020) with example materials of what admissions folks are likely to get; you can find that material here.

How “rigorous” should my classes be?

1. Maximize rigor for your favorite academic subject. Even if you get a B, it’s worth demonstrating your particular interest in the subject. (Falling below a B suggests that your enthusiasm for a subject is not matched by self-awareness.)
2. For your other college preparatory coursework, take as rigorous of courses as you can without risking your GPA. If you are worried that you will struggle—for whatever reason (Lythcott-Haims, 2022, p. 99)—to maintain your GPA in a class you do not care for even after weighting, then it might be time to take a simpler version. That said, generating course-equivalent college credits from AP, IB, and Dual Enrollment courses can be a very effective way of cutting your college education costs 🤑.
3. International schools (UK 🇬🇧) are reported to favor AP courses and test scores, so if your college ambitions extend globally then consider taking AP courses that help you get a 4+ on the AP exam. IB courses are similarly favored, but in different contexts.
4. For other courses on your schedule, avoid getting into a high-stress situation that risks your overall GPA.

🚩 Warning! 🚩 I have been talking about your GPA in the manner that you are used to: as if it is a real thing. It is not. Many colleges will use your transcript to recalculate your GPA using only the courses on your transcript that matter to them. The UC system has an intricate recalculation process discussed below. Many Canadian 🇨🇦 universities will not not weight your GPA at all. So when you disagree with a college on what your high school GPA turned out to be, they will tell you this:

The Good Place: Learning with Non-Competitive Friends

One of the simplest things you can do to boost your performance in a class is to have a friend—as peer, not competitor—in the class with you: the non-competitive friend increases your sense of safety enabling you to take greater risks than you would if you were worried about being vulnerable with a competitor. The research on this demonstrated that:

Even just one quality friendship can shield against the harmful effects of loneliness and bolster self-esteem and academic engagement. One study followed 365 students as they transitioned from elementary to middle school and found two key predictors of well-being and performance: first, feeling accepted by peers, and second, having at least one good friend. The researchers theorized that students who feel a sense of belonging don’t have to worry about scanning for threats in the classroom and can instead devote those important cognitive resources to their schoolwork, resulting in an academic boost. (Wallace, 2023, p. 147)

So loop your friends into your class-scheduling process, expect that classes without friends (like at community college?) will seem a bit harder than you expect, and plan to make a friend in a class where you feel isolated—this will be a valuable academic skill to take to college!

Strategy! You should anticipate needing letters of recommendation from a few (2-3) teachers as part of your college application process. In addition to coordinating courses with your friends, choosing a particularly aura-farmable class for your Junior year so your teacher will have plenty of favorable things to say in their letter of recommendation is also a clever plan (Heffernan & Harrington, 2020).

The Bad Place: When a Rigorous Course has an Ineffective Teacher

Conversely, you may find that the courses preparing the best-and-brightest—who are you and your friends, of course—for college have, or get dumped upon, a teacher who is not engaging you in the learning process. At all.

That was half of the math curriculum for me and my peer group after my high school gave up trying to keep a qualified Calculus teacher. I was there and I know how dispiriting it is when school is failing to keep up with you.

It is reported (Tucker & Strange, 2005) that ineffective teachers will negatively impact your learning, perhaps even more perniciously than Summer Learning Loss (see also: Brookings on Summer Learning Loss) and this leaves you with a quandary: do you

1. intentionally pursue achievement elsewhere, or
2. do you work extra-hard to make where you are at better for everybody around you, or
3. do you put your head down and exercise your disassociation skills while contending with a wicked case of senoritis?

I took the third option which was almost certainly the wrong choice. The curriculum in The Bad Place is not about what it is about. It is instead about how your choices create who you become.

Specific University of California Information

• The UC system has their “A-G” course requirements: 4 years of English, 3 of Math, 2 of Science, History, and non-English Language, and 1 year each of Art and a College-Prep Elective. Only these courses will count for your GPA, and only after 9th grade.
• The GPA uses flat grades: an A is an A even if it has a + or – attached to it. But the GPA is sort-of weighted: out-of-state students can only count AP or IB courses for weighting and the maximum course-semesters is 8. (That’s 2 full-year AP/IB courses for 2 years.)
• To estimate your GPA, here’s a calculator. The minimum GPA is listed here (currently 3.4 for out-of-state) but the higher practical GPA can be seen by who’s being admitted here (on the “FR GPA by Yr” tab).
• Declaring your intended major has consequences on a per-campus basis; review this with your IEC. It’s also worth noting that UC Davis and UC Irvine are relatively more welcoming to out-of-state students than other UC schools.

Additional References

Heffernan, L., & Harrington, M. D. (2020). Grown and flown: How to support your teen, stay close as a family, and raise independent adults (First Flatiron Books paperback edition). Flatiron Books.

Knuth, D. (December 1974). “Structured Programming with go to Statements”. ACM Computing Surveys. 6 (4): 268.  doi:10.1145/356635.356640. 

Lythcott-Haims, J. (2022). How to raise an adult: Break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success (First Holt paperbacks edition). Henry Holt and Company.

Oakley, B. A., Rogowsky, B., & Sejnowski, T. J. (2021). Uncommon sense teaching. TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Tucker, J. & Strange, P. (2005). Linking Teacher Evaluation and Student Learning. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development

Wallace, J. B. (2023). Never enough: When achievement culture becomes toxic–and what we can do about it. Portfolio/Penguin.

* Professional tip for the Computer Science kids, learn this line: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” (Knuth, 1974) If you’re unclear as to how this comes out in behavioral patterns, please refer to XKCD #1691.