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This is from the article linked at the bottom.</p>
<p>No matter how smart this girl is, her parents really ought to look up the definition of the word “pretentious”.</p>
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<p>I want to add though that I wish this girl no ill-will. She sounds terrific, and I’m sure she will thrive in college. Best of luck to her.</p>
<p>how unusual do you think it is to be accepted to YPS at 16?</p>
<p>I don’t know about pretentious. I watched a news clip that was on YouTube and she seemed really lovely.</p>
<p>“No matter how smart this girl is, her parents really ought to look up the definition of the word “pretentious”.”</p>
<p>Oh come on, this is a 15 year old. Let’s quit picking. Sounds like a typical freshman.</p>
<p>I think she sounded completely normal to me. I mean, she has a right to be proud of herself considering 99.9% of 18 year olds don’t make it into Harvard, let alone a 15 year old.</p>
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<p>Probably not as unusual as one would think. Personally, I’ll be 16 when the end of the college application season comes around (though I’m not really expecting to get into any of HYPS, much less all of them hah), and I got there with just one skipped grade and a summer birthday. I’m sure that at least a decent percentage of the kids who skip grades would be pretty talented academically and otherwise, thus there are probably at least handfuls of <17 year olds being accepted into HYPS every year.</p>
<p>Yale has an unofficial policy of not accepting kids who won’t turn at least 17 some time during Freshman year. Sometimes, they’ll suggest a gap year and make a conditional offer to a later matriculating class. Or sometimes they reject applicants because they’d rather give that slot to someone else – as appears to be the fact in this case.</p>
<p>Just because she didn’t know why she was rejected and her parents made a guess doesn’t necessarily imply “pretentiousness”. Knowing that articles get written to include the most juicy phrases (think Murdoch newspapers), I’ve made a point to not be riled by the selective words attributed to people – especially 15 yr olds.</p>
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<p>Why? How do you know this? Do any other colleges do anything like that?</p>
<p>Worries me in the sense that there may be bias against younger applicants (e.g. perhaps Yale’s supposed limit of 17 during freshman year is more of a “19 > 18 > 17 > 16 > 15, cut at 16” rather than “17=18=19=20 > 16 > 15, cut at 16”?).</p>
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<p>Fair enough. I’ll eat my slice of humble pie.</p>
<p>I’ve been misquoted plenty. Or the reporter says something like “Would you say xyz?”, you reply “uh, I guess so”, thinking, but I might phrase it more elegantly if I weren’t put on the spot. The next day the paper says “Mathmom says xyz.” </p>
<p>My dh’s Harvard roommate was 15 when he started Harvard, but I didn’t find out until 15 years later when I was talking to him about how best to keep my son challenged in math. I’d also guess that 16 is not too unusual - I skipped a grade and had a September birthday.</p>
<p>I think this kind of thing was much more common one or two generations ago, before “skipping” started being seen as not a good thing for kids to do. I have a friend my age who was 15 when she graduated from Bronx Science. My father was 16 years old when he graduated from a public high school in Yonkers and began his freshman year at Yale, back in the 1930’s; he didn’t turn 17 until April of the following year. (By the way, he’s always regretted beginning college so young; it was hard enough being a Jewish student at Yale back in the 10% quota days, from a public school and from a poor family, without trying to do it at 16.) </p>
<p>I’ve heard of many other examples from days of yore of kids skipping multiple years.</p>
<p>I never understand why people skip a grade or two. There are always something one can do to stimulate one’s intellect even in an elementary course. If a kid is emotionally more mature than peers, then I see skipping may help. Otherwise, skipping a year or two won’t do much if the kid is truely gifted. Gifted kids have a different way of thinking that won’t be addressed by going a year or two ahead.</p>
<p>^As someone who was a year and half younger than my peers, I’m a big fan of skipping on occasion. The only really good year my oldest had in elementary school was the one where his 1st grade teacher arranged for him to do math with the third graders. There was no one in the gifted program (which kicked in 5th grade) that was anywhere near his math level. Once one gets to middle school or high school there are usually ways to accelerate by subject. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t say I was wildly gifted, but I’d probably pass the bar for any gifted program. I never had a problem fitting in. My older son who was on the older side of his class I think would have been better off by skipping, but it’s true it still wouldn’t have been enough. The obvious thing to do was homeschooling, but he liked being with friends, so we bumbled along doing extra math at home and he complained all the time that he wasn’t learning enough.</p>
<p>One of my kids skipped a year and also did significant subject acceleration in two areas (4-5 years). We were lucky to live in an area that has selective entry MS and HS math/science/CS programs that offer an easy way to take a faster track, including a significant number of college-level courses taught in-house. He could take advanced classes with his age peers – and he was not the youngest in his grade. He chose not to go over to the flagship (a short bus ride away) for courses, preferring to be involved with his ECs and friends at HS. Best of both worlds. He would have withered on the vine at our local HS.</p>
<p>He also came home at night and taught himself most of a BS in CS.</p>
<p>My kids were simply not mature enough to skip grades. Not an academic issue but social, emotional,pragmatic ones. However, I knew kids, and one in particular comes to mind, were truly miserable in high school. They were “doing time there”. They didn’t fit in and were unhappy. The one young man was thrilled to go off to college and did just fine in that atmosphere. He did commute, but made many friends that were just more like him. The parents were concerned about maturity issues but for him, it was the right thing. </p>
<p>Sometimes, it does not work out, since college is not all academics and the interpersonal part can get intense. Most every kid I know who dropped out of school, did not do so because the academics were too difficult. It was juggling the personal with the academic, along with dealing with some personal issues that also arise in young adulthood. Hormones, depressions, stress… all of these things rear their ugly heads.</p>