Very skewed transcript - how would colleges react? What do I do?

I think you will be a borderline case for a lot of top schools because your UWGPA is going to end up between a 3.475 and 3.525 far short of the 3.85-4.00 most successful admits have top competitive schools. My concern is that whomever reads your file is going to scratch their heads and say, why did this applicant NOT take the path of least resistance and graduate with an upward trend of 3.625 GPA (2.5+4.0+4.0+4.0) and 9-12 APs instead? But they chose to put the after burners on and lost control of the academic narrative they were steering.

If you currently have lots of Tier 2 ECs, excellent recommendation, some "spike" activity, high honors and awards and something amazing about your narrative besides these 17 AP plus DE class, I think that will help you with RD applications.

I think its impressive that you took 17 APs, so have to ask you something serious. If you know you are struggling with such as high course load that you can not sustain for another semester until graduation, wouldn't the mature thing be to drop a few classes so you can end up with a 4.0 next term? If you did that, at least application readers would be more sympathetic and supportive of you trying to correct the academic ship that you are steering straight into the rocks.

Think about it. Good luck.

If it was only an upward trend colleges may be more likely to accept you, but these stats seem all over the place with no trends at all, which is what you know, and colleges like to see consistency. That being said you are taking a lot of challenging classes and have great scores, so if your essay and extracurriculars are good you 100% have a shot at some competitive schools

Hi, thank you for asking your question! A few things can be said about your grades and college admissions chances that, hopefully, will put your worries to rest. Admissions officers prefer that you have a GPA that is greater than a 3.75 on average, especially for selective schools. In AP courses try to aim for a 3.7+, Honors a 3.85+ and CP level courses a 4.0. Additionally, you want to try to have an "upwards trend" across the four years of high school. I believe, from what you have told me, you have all this and that's fantastic!

Some other things to consider now would be having extracurriculars that align with your major of interest, strong letters of recommendation, and an upwards trend in your course rigor as well.