Originally Posted by indigo
Unfortunately it appears that renewable annual merit scholarships might not be renewed for a number of students:
U.S.News & World Report - Education, 5 Big Financial Aid Lies, by Kim Clark, April 6, 2010
Originally Posted by article
5. "Renewable" merit scholarships: Most schools and organizations tell scholarship winners the rules they'll need to follow and grades they'll need to achieve to renew their scholarships in future years. But only a few organizations give prospective, and, all too often, overconfident, students any statistics or warning of the odds of their receiving merit scholarships for all four years.[/i ... some schools have set much higher and tougher hurdles—GPAs of 3.5, or even 3.8—for other merit scholarships, and [i]don't always warn the winners about previous recipients' records of achieving those kinds of grades over four years.
I wonder if not all of these students really understand how hard a 3.8 might be to maintain. In the U.S. system where many honors & AP classes have a +1 point. Thus many of these students have GPA's that well exceed a 4.0 in High School. In addition to calculating GPA's for H.S. typcially plus & minuses don't matter. But in college GPA's, that A-, B- is worth less points that the A or B. To maintain a 3.8, if your on a semester system taking 5 classes, you must get 4 A's and better than a B in the remaining. If any of those is an A- you drop below a 3.8.