See how your profile ranks among thousands of other students using CollegeVine. Calculate your chances at your dream schools and learn what areas you need to improve right now — it only takes 3 minutes and it's 100% free.
As most college-bound students know, the college application is a space for showing off. You want to put your absolute best foot forward to wow those college admissions committees. Sometimes, though, there are less than flattering aspects of your application that you simply can’t avoid.
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. So, what should you do? 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. If you’re wondering what to do about a blemish on your transcript, don’t miss our advice.
It’s appropriate to address a bad grade on your transcript in a few different scenarios, but the common thread in each is that there is a perfectly good explanation for your bad grade. You may be a conscientious, hard working, intelligent student, but even the most perfect student might sometimes get a bad grade under extenuating circumstances.
For example, if you went through significant personal changes, a family emergency, or another unavoidable event that had an impact on your academic work, you will definitely want to explain what happened. This includes things like a serious illness, the death of a family member, moving to a new school, or a similar, unavoidable event.
Keep in mind that if you want to explain a bad grade and have your explanation bear any weight, it needs to be significantly different from your normal performance. 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. Explaining a C or C- will be much easier if you normally pull a perfect GPA.
At the same time, the grades you’re explaining need to be an isolated event. 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.
If your grades suffer significantly due to an unavoidable event, and you are able to recover afterwards, there is a good chance that an admissions committee will be sympathetic to your explanation.