I would like to know just how important a persons grades are in highschool. How much do they effect their whole lives in the grand scheme of things. Are the SAT’s more important than your overall average. Is getting into college what really matters. Then how much do the employers look at the grades, Or do they just look at what you have achieved
Your high school grades don’t matter once you’ve gone to college. Employers do care more about what you’ve achieved than your grades. The thing is, few high school students have achieved anything. And the few who have a long list of achievements usually also have a high GPA (in my experience).
Many employers also value a basic ability to use punctuation.
What IS important is that you get a good solid grounding in various subjects in high school, and that generally means good grades.
If you slack off in high school and go to college with a substandard background in mathematics, english, and the sciences, you’re going to have a really hard time of it.
The grades themselves aren’t necessarily important, but the knowledge that is required to get them IS. So work your butt off, and get the best grades you can.
Excellent advice given here so far. I would note, however, that very few people do well in college if they didn’t do well in high school.
just do enough to get into the college you want. then, when you get to college and take general education courses, just make sure you don’t screw yourself out of getting into the actual college (business, engineering…) at that university. your last two years when you are studying what you want (hopefully), you will not have to worry… you will get good grades and learn (hopefully). if not, then you will be scrweed.
bottom line is to make sure you get into the college you want. that requires good grades in high school most of the time.
or…
you could screw around in high school and get bad grades and then just go to a community college for 2 years and then get into a state univ. after that and start trying.
however, if you don’t learn stuff in high school and first two years in college then you better be learning stuff on your own on the internet and stuff. because keep in mind you will be 19-20 years old and you won’t know anything at that point. kinda scary.
I did poorly in High School. I really regret it too, I think I could have done better. At the time I didn’t care about school, and just wanted out.
I never took my S.A.T, and would probably do terrible on it. Up to now I have never gone to college, but over the past two years or so I have pushed myself to learn on my own.
I plan on going to college next fall though, so we shall see how well I can do. I will end up going the two years Community College and 4 years university route.
If you are in high school now, do good, it will help. If not the best thing to do is want it and try for it. Don’t let your past drag you down.
And don’t screw up in college, in case you ever decide you want to go to grad school. You never know.
Yep. Otherwise you’ll sweat the admittance to grad school, even if you do well on the GRE (or whatever test you take for your particular grad program). Because I worried - the school I’m at would have been a “safety” as an undergrad, but as a grad student, my undergrad grades worried me a lot.
As noted above, good grades = better college chances etc.
But I often hear “I don’t care about college”…
Ok, how about $25,000 a year for 40 years? That is the average salary differencebetween high school and college.
High school grades are an important factor for getting into college, but the courses one takes are also very important. Getting a B in an AP level class can be more impressive than receiving an A in a regular class. Scoring well on AP exams (3 or better) is even more impressive.
Uhm…depending on where you live and your chosen career. Say you go to school to be a teacher. You graduate, and then before you get a class, you substitute. In this state (Oklahoma), you make $5 a day more as a sub because you have a certificate. That’s less than a grand a year more with the degree. Then say you get a job as a teacher… you’re going to pull in under $25K to start anyways. That would suggest that people with high school diplomas… make less than nothing?
My current job doesn’t require a degree. I make twice as much as my mom, the teacher of 4 year olds. TWICE. And I don’t make a lot. Then again, nobody’s asked me what my college GPA was in years…
Corr
(who has a degree but not a job using it)
My daughter, now a freshman in college, had colleges throwing scholarship money at her, begging her to come to their school. And we got a “good student” discount on the auto insurance when she got her driver’s license, too (State Farm).
All because she got straight A’s in high school.
Grades count. 
Corrvin, that’s an average. Of course it doesn’t mean that every person with a college degree makes more than every person without one.
To all those who have gone through (part of) life and now want to tell teenagers that grades are important, don’t waist your breath. I am applying to colleges and am just now realizing how important grades are. But even if I had realized their importance as a teenager catching the eye of the pretty girl who sits next to you is more important.
As for the OP if you want a job that requires no higher education then grades would not be that important. However if college is part of your grand scheme then grades are important, especially those relating to your major.
I’m writing as a former high school and college English teacher who now reviews applications for admissions to an undergraduate human services program. I realize that you’re posting to a message board, not applying to college, but I’m going to use your OP to emphasize an important point: If you write to a college and have the number of writing errors that you had in your post, nobody will bother to look at your grades or test scores. Your cover letter is what gets an admissions counselor to keep looking at your file. Your essays show how much effort you have put into presenting yourself as a person who will succeed academically. I count 10 errors in your post, and that’s without looking at your word choice or organization. One easy thing you can do right now is to proofread everything, even if it’s just a post to a message board. The more you practice, the better your writing will be. It will also improve your grades and increase your SAT score.
I don’t mean to harp on the immediately preceeding post, but unfortunately, it is correct. If you want to make the big bucks someday, you will need to express yourself well orally or in writing, but most likely both.
The one caveat I would offer is that it is also important to engage in a great volume of writing. While revision and proof reading are of importance, developing the skill requires practice. And the first thing you must practice is writing more than just phone messages. Every thing you write should then be re-written to see how much better you can do it.
The word processor is a god send for writers. Write it fast, print it out, and mark it up. Make the changes and keep doing it until you run out of time.
The bottom line: Aim for good grades, and aim to develop critical scholastic skills. You’ll find that the two goals go hand-in-hand.
A lot of students try to rationalize their poor grades by saying, “It’s not the grades, it’s what you learn.” While there’s an element of truth to that, the best way (IMO) to develop all-around mastery of high-school-level knowledge is to aim for good grades. High school is, after all, a time for laying down important foundational knowledge. You can (and should!) supplement that with self-study – by reading library books and encyclopedia articles, for example – but do NOT treat the latter as a substitute for the former. You’ll be making a huge mistake.
If you do well in high school, and if you have a couple of years of college education under your belt, then you’ll be in a much better position to expand your horizons through self-education. Even then though, I think a student should focus on getting top-notch grades, as this is usually a good way to learn about things which you might otherwise think are important.