Academics: How colleges think about your grades
Colleges are schools, so they care a lot about your academics. However, they don’t necessarily think about GPA like you do.
What happens behind the scenes
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Step 1: Reweighted
Some high schools have weighted grades, where an extra grade point is added for honors or AP courses, but not all high schools have this policy. Hence, admissions offices need to balance the scales by removing the weighting and then re-weighting the grades based on what they know about the strength of the school, class, and teacher.
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Step 2: Five-Solids
Colleges and universities are schools, so they care most about the core academic subjects: Math, English, Science, Social Studies, and Foreign Language, also known as the “Five Solids.” Because of this, your five solids are considered first before you move on for further review.
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Step 3: Profile
At this point, your whole transcript is reviewed with an extra emphasis on the courses connected to your profile. In other words, if you are a coder, then your math, physics, and computer science courses will be examined more closely and weighted more. This is because the college is trying to assemble the best of each profile.
The X-Factor: Intellectual Curiosity
This is one of the most elusive yet impactful aspects of your academic evaluation because no clear score is associated with it. Instead, this is derived from a combination of sources like your chosen classes, what your teachers say about you in their letters of recommendation, and even the academically related extracurriculars you joined. Through all of these avenues, the college admissions office is trying to determine if you like learning. Why do they care about this? Curiosity is the desire to learn and experience new things, which is very significant when it comes to success in school.