Can You Retake Classes to Improve Your GPA in High School?
Though to some a high school grade-point average is just a number, to others this important digit is the ticket to the colleges of their choice. If you are eager to craft a GPA that is as impressive as possible, you may seek out ways to make up for past academic indiscretions. If there is just one negative course mark holding your GPA back, you may be able to strike this misstep from your record by retaking the course in question.
Other People Are Reading
-
Options
-
While specific options vary from school to school, at most schools students are entitled to retake courses if they are seeking to obtain a higher grade. Though retaking a course may make it more difficult to fit in other necessary courses, many high schools will work with students who have a set reason for wanting their GPAs to rise. In most schools, there is no set limit to the number of courses that you can retake, though some do have more stringent guidelines.
Limitations
-
Depending upon the school you attend, your grade may have to be below a certain level to be entitled to retake a course. For example, in some schools students can only retake courses in which they received a D or lower. This requirement is intended to ensure that students who received B's or other similarly high scores don't continually retake courses in an attempt to hit the perfect 4.0. Additionally, though many schools will allow only the highest grade to impact your GPA, both scores will still appear on your high school transcript, meaning transcript viewers will still get a peek at the score you are trying to erase. Because many colleges make acceptance decisions based most heavily on GPA, however, this negative score may have less of an impact if you retake, even if it remains on your transcript. Some schools have even more guidelines that pertain to this practice, and will, for example, only allow students to take a certain number of courses over or require the permission of the original teacher for the student to retake the course.
-
Reasons
-
There are a number of reasons why someone may want to retake a course to raise his GPA. In most cases, the individual retaking the course is trying to get into a highly competitive college or university and sees course retakes as his only way to do so. For some students, however, it is simply the result of the student's eagerness to acquire the maximum GPA possible.
Considerations
-
Before you sign up to retake anything, it is important to consider the downfalls of doing so. For many students, the four years of high school are packed full of necessary courses. Unless you intend to do this retake during a summer session, something that commonly comes with a fee, retaking this course will require dropping another to make room in your schedule. Additionally, it is possible to retake a course and get a lower grade than before. If this happens, some schools allow you to keep the higher mark while others require that you take the most recent score earned as your final grade, potentially leaving your GPA in worse shape than it previously was.
-
