Upward or Downward Trend?

There's been a lot of discussion about having a low GPA freshman year but working hard and showing an upward trend for your remainder undergraduate years. I'm curious to see if the opposite is also common. For those that started with a 4.0 freshman year, there's nowhere to go but constant or down for your remainder years. How many of you here have exhibited a downward trend over your undergraduate career?

5 Comments
 

Yea i know, I'm just interested because I was in a discussion with my friend about grad school admissions and he said that it's better to have an upward trend 3.5 than a flat trend 3.5. So I started wondering how often it is for kids to have a downward trend. Don't most grad schools care about your trend? (MBA, Masters, PhD progs)

 

^the "trend" is of little relevance to any grad school program. I don't think that someone who trends from 4.0 to 3.8 is going to get dinged because of it.

 
youngmonkey^the "trend" is of little relevance to any grad school program. I don't think that someone who trends from 4.0 to 3.8 is going to get dinged because of it.

You understand that to trend from a 4.0 to a 3.8 means that for every semester you get a 4.0, you are getting a 3.6 in another semester? To take the OP's 3.5 GPA example, a downward trend might mean semester GPAs of: 4.0, 4.0, 3.9, 3.9, 3.0, 3.1, 3.0, 3.1? Of course this is a little extreme but given that schools like HBS asks you to list your GPA by year, any downward trend can go against you. I could be wrong though....

 

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