Worried that your child won’t get into the best university in the world? Consider this your personal college planning checklist for parents by yours truly, PenningPapers!

Consider Your Child’s GPA 

Grades can be a bit confusing when applying to colleges; some schools only take grades from 10-11 into consideration, others take all of high school into consideration. 

For UC (University of California) schools, it’s important to have high marks in your 10th – 11th grade years, as those years are the ones that the UC system considers specifically. 

Most private schools on the other hand will look at all grades from high school. 

Okay, so what about summer school? Well, that’s where things can get a bit tricky. Whether colleges count summer school grades depends on whether it falls under the right academic year. 

For example. If you took a course over the summer after 9th grade, your school may or may both consider that a course in the 10th grade year. Some schools will say it is a summer class in the 9th year, others will say it is a summer course in the 10th year. It depends on what your school transcript says. It’s good to check with your school’s policy. 

Give Your GPA A Competitive Edge

So getting high marks and a good amount of AP classes is a sign of academic excellence that can impress admissions officers, but is that all? Yes, there is. 

Here are a few things to keep in mind if you want your child to have a competitive edge with their GPA.  

1. Community college courses before high school.                                                         

The reason you would want this is so that your child can have a head start on some of the required courses later on. If your child is ahead of the game in math, for instance, the admissions officers will know that they are putting in extra effort and challenging themselves with more rigorous work. It’s important to note though that a good grade is BETTER than a poor grade no matter the circumstances. A freshman in high school taking a difficult math course and receiving a poor grade is not as impressive as one who takes a regular class and succeeds. Therefore, it’s important to know your child’s limitations. 

2. Enjoyable Language Classes.                 

This is one that for some reason does not get much attention. It’s important that your kids enjoy the language classes they take because it’s actually one of the few if not only ways to fully succeed in language classes. Far too often we get students who took Spanish our sign language classes because they thought they would be “easy A courses”. No language class is easy until the student can fully appreciate learning it. We recommend exposing your child to different academic languages through movies and music early on. This streamlines language classes much more and makes it easy for students to worry shoot other more difficult courses. 

For example: students with a passion for kpop tend to do better in Korean language courses in school. Students who have seen and enjoyed classic movies like The Godfather tell us that they enjoyed learning in their Italian language classes. 

3. Exponential academic growth.             

When a student has exponential academic growth, their transcripts demonstrate a level of maturity and progress over time. Admissions officers will be impressed if students move from a 3.5 GPA to a 3.8 GPA. 

In this way, it can be very easy for students with perfect scores to have no direction other than down. If you’re worried about your child’s grades moving from a 4.0 one year into a 3.9 another, try not to fret too much. Although a downward trend in grades is seen as a bad thing to admissions officers, they will usually be very understanding about the circumstances if the downward trend only lasts for a short time and is not that severe. However, if a student had a significant negative trend in grades such as a 3.8 GPA to a 3.4, then there is reason to worry. Your child will need strong extracurricular activities, notable awards, and strong admissions essays to compensate for lower grades. 

4. Academic major slant. 

If your child has a stellar student with perfect marks all across their transcript, as in, they have a solid A grade for every class taken, then this does not apply to them. If they are weak in some areas and strong in others, or simply weak in every subject, then this is for you. 

In short, your child should have strong marks for the respective classes which apply to their declared major. 

For instance, if a student were to apply to UC Berkeley as a computer science major, they would have an advantage if their Math scores were very high. This is because competency in math is a core part of success in computer science. Schools like Berkeley will take into consideration whether good grades correlate with the major that you are applying to. 

Applying to Occidental as an English Major? Your grades in English class should be exceptional. 

Applying to UCLA for their Bio-Sci program? Make sure your grades in biology and chemistry are impeccable. 

GET THEIR EXTRACURRICULARS NARROWED DOWN

“Narrowed down? Doesn’t my child need a plethora of unique extracurriculars if they want to get accepted into college?”

The answer to that is no. We go more in depth about extracurriculars in general in our sister articles, which you can find here. Yeah, we know: college planning for parents is always filled with random, arbitrary lies.

Best Extracurricular Activities For College Admissions

Extracurricular Activities for College Admissions: Myths

How Important Is Community Service For College Admissions

Make sure your child has a good idea of what they really want to specialize in as their main extracurricular activity. This is usually a hobby that is productive, something that produces a product.

For instance, cooking, bodybuilding, painting, and music are all extracurriculars that manifest creativity into a physical form. They all create a product in the end.

Things like video games would not work.

Your child should be pursuing something that is not only productive, but also enjoyable. Make sure not to force activities down their throats; this is an easy way for your child to end up disliking the activity and later failing to become skilled at it. Enjoyable activities are always the easiest to digest. It also makes it easy for them to earn awards in the field, which make for a major boost in their college applications.  

GET YOUR CHILD ACTUAL PROFESSIONAL COLLEGE COUNSELLING

Please don’t think of this as a shameless plug. This is actually very, very important. It’s one of those pitfalls that we found as one of the main reasons why students struggled with high school. They didn’t have anyone skilled and thorough enough to talk to.

You should think of this section as selecting an insurance company: some people can get away with not having insurance, but not everyone. Besides, it’s not worth putting your faith into a perfect and spotless four years. High school is rough, and there are bound to be bumps in the road; don’t risk your child’s education.

You can fix this by getting your child a professional college counselor.

Sadly, no. We don’t mean the free ones provided in your school. The problem with counselors from school is that their job is typically to make your children feel good, not to guide them to the most productive path to success.

A good professional college counselor is one who has the time to actually keep up with your child at least a few days a week to speak with them about their high school progress.

School counselors don’t get this luxury. Even if they had the time to fit in your child for more than one meeting a week, they are drowned out by other students and their individual needs. They can only think about your choice to apply to Berkeley or Stanford for a few minutes before being hounded by others about the next classroom bullying problem in room 240. It’s not personalized, it’s not thorough enough.

As stated earlier: It’s not mandatory that you choose our personalized package. As long as you have any specialized college counselor (who doesn’t give incorrect or outdated info), your child will be okay. We do, however, believe we have perfected everything your child would need to successfully enter their reach school.

You want to make sure that your child is not only in the right productive mindset to get accepted into college, but also that they are on their toes every year. Far too often we see students get side-tracked by simple distractions. Everything from video games to simple high school dramas amongst students can get students caught in the wrong environment and, as such, put their success at risk.

This is often no fault of the students, as they are usually too young to fully grasp how easily their academic success is affected by their environment. All it takes is for one instance of the “Bad Apple effect” in one classroom to jeopardize your child’s academic progress.

For more information on which college prep services you should trust, check out our sister site on trustworthy services here.

College Application Services: Trustworthy Ones

As for our college prep packages, click here to schedule an appointment so we may discuss which services will work best with your child for their respective year.

Worried your child won’t have the GPA it takes to get accepted into university? Concerned they will not stand out as a unique individual because of a lack of impressive extracurriculars? Does your child lack a skilled, personal college counselor? Ask us about our High School Years packages and boot camp program. We specialize in guiding students throughout their high school years by running them through weekly consultations that will constantly sharpen their minds. This ensures no external threats can contaminate your child’s academic success.

Or, simply call us at 1(626) 260-4997 to schedule an appointment to plan your child’s college success!