There’s also a culture of “effortless perfection” in some schools, which is very dangerous.
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I haven’t noticed this. I’ve known our Val and sal to spend five-six hours a night on school work. The kids are not shy saying this, nor are the parents. And they are exceptionally well organized.
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My daughter worked hard as did her friends, but some students denied spending a lot of time working (their parents stated otherwise).
I am sure there are school cultures that made not working sound cool. What I found at our school is that the kids that needed the certainty of a 100, and could not tolerate a 99 worked long hours. If you are ok to be with less certainty of a perfect grade, when really 94 was the threshold for an A, you didn’t need to work long hours. We also have an A+ at 97. The dean of admissions at UChicago told us they didn’t care about the difference between an A and an A+, and that’s just showing off. Whether you are the type to make silly mistakes or not will determine whether you got an A or an A+.
I don’t know what everybody’s grades were. I do know that they were limited to 6 APs and were busy.
We are a small school. In many classes the top half a dozen kids sat at the same table and compared notes. So I have some idea 
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My D’s graduating class was big (over 400) and our district has more than 1 HS. That being said, my daughter basically had the same group of students in her classes. She didn’t discuss grades with anybody.
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Your kids attend(ed) a private school which is an entirely different eco-system. A course load of all APs might be entirely appropriate for that student body. It’s a moot point at many public schools in MA because APs aren’t typically available (or widely available) in 9/10th. Nonetheless it hasn’t seemed to hamper student achievement or admissions results.
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I am still trying to understand the concept of the top half of the class sitting at the table together and comparing notes. That sounds hyper competitive to me and would lead to a lot of unnecessary anxiety for my child.
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Totally agree -especially if they are reporting back to parents!
I think that whether or not students compare grades is a function of school culture, school size, and also individual personalities. My kids have mostly gone to quite small schools where you’d think everyone would know everybody’s GPA and relative standing. However, the culture of all of their schools has discouraged comparing yourself to others or even talking about one’s own performance. At at least one of their schools, I think it is even seen as a little gauche to talk about grades, test scores, and college outcomes (just the way it is seen as gauche to talk about one’s wealth or one’s parents’ highfalutin’ jobs). It might happen in 1:1 conversations with your best friend, but not as a group.
That said, clearly it also varies with personality so based on passing conversations with my kids, I think it is exaggeration to say that no one talks about their performance ever. Instead, I’d say that my kids don’t talk about their grades, and they’ve expressed some frustration with kids who they perceive as overly competitive or bragging. Their friendship groups mostly consist of other kids who feel the same way. So they don’t hear a lot of that sort of talk (and thus the shock when they do hear it). I actually think it is perfectly plausible (even likely) that despite school culture, there are some social circles within their schools where a lot more overt comparisons go on.
Nevertheless, in my observation, even when my kids happen to know a classmate or friend’s particular grade on a specific assessment, they are basically unwilling to draw general conclusions about their classmates based on a few data points. They seem determined not to look for patterns or judge the classmates’ overall strength/intellect let alone guess class rank. I know this because sometimes (as a nosy mother), I try to push my kids to tell me more about how their classmates and friends are doing in general or where older kids ended up going to college. My kids usually can’t answer because they don’t know or they might know a friend’s individual grade on one assignment, but they haven’t really thought about the overall pattern.
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My son is neither the Val nor the sal, and if he sat at a table with both of them, he felt zero competition from either them or from anyone else. They all respected each other. He even went to prom with one of them (as a friend). You don’t feel competitive with people if you feel that you are not in each other’s way. Multiple people could get into any one school they want to. I don’t know if the other kids felt any more competitive. They still meet occasionally four years after for a lunch or dinner. He would help them out if they asked when he was in school. They did ask on occasion. When they asked him where he was applying he told them. Incidentally he didn’t clash for EA for them, but if he wanted to apply to the same school as them because it happened to be a better fit, he wouldn’t have hesitated. I doubt they would have either. They were all friends from 3rd grade
If they are sitting together it doesn’t mean you know the other person’s every grade. It is not polite to ask. But you have a general sense of whether they are at a 100 or a 95 ( still an A) and whether they are stressed about it. Etc
If my daughter sat at a table with the top kids in her class and compared notes, it would lead to a lot of stress for her. This stress would not have to do with taking more classes or getting higher grades etc, it would just be a general type of stress. Thankfully these discussions did not take place and our HS outwardly discouraged these conversations.
When you are in class with the same group of friends and peers, it is not unusual to have an idea about classes etc, but these types of discussions around a table did not occur. Nobody had a general idea about whether a peer had a 95 or 100 or an 87, and college apps were not discussed at all. That was strongly discouraged, and my D had no idea where her close friends were applying.
When they did sit around a table they were either working on a project together or discussing something like yearbook or a Friday night game.
People knew who the top kids in the schools were, depending on who took what when (eg there were 4 kids that took AP E&M C in 11th grade without any prior Physics). College discussions were not widespread. My son was asked by peers what his EA was – just out of curiosity – not that their behavior would change as a result. He found it silly that some kids would ask him where he was going (during the process) – they were assuming that he’d get wherever he’d apply. He said his peers that were applying to similarly competitive schools were more careful to ask where he was applying (as opposed to asking him where he was going), as they understood the complexities of the process.
He also picked a close friend that was not in the same bucket (different schools/interests) to bounce essay drafts off of each other. He found it very valuable – a third perspective apart from the GC and the parent.
The kids in my D’s grade also knew who the top kids were, but it was only because they were in classes together.
I am happy about our districts AP policy, and I am also grateful that the kids and parents were sent emails all the time reminding them that the college process is private, please do not discuss grades, classes etc. They were continuously reminded that this was not a race to the top.
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Interesting. It is hard for me to guess what my kids would feel in such a conversation around a table, but I don’t think it would necessarily be stress. Maybe it would be stress for my more anxious one. But for the others, I think it would be more a combination of eye-rolling and boredom. They don’t talk about each other’s grades because they think it is tactless and also they just don’t care or find it an interesting subject of conversation. As @twogirls said, my kids and their friends would rather talk about the yearbook or a game (or in my D22’s case, if they did gossip, it was about stuff like who is dating whom 
) However, maybe it would be different if they attended a school with honors/AP courses and class rank. Although funnily enough, my D24 did a virtual summer program last week, and when I asked how the first day went, she said fine but she was annoyed that upon introducing themselves during the ice-breaker activity, many of the participants led with how many AP courses they had taken last year or were going to take next year. Cue the eye-rolling and boredom. To be clear, I am not arguing that there is anything wrong with talking about AP load and/or grades. I am just saying that it is not inevitable and it doesn’t happen at all schools or among all high-achievers. And while frankly, I find this sort of topic fascinating, my kids do not.
Back to the earlier conversation, I think it is incorrect to view some kids choosing to take a large number of APs as indicative of a high-pressure environment, but I suspect that there are some high schools where kids (and their parents) experience a lot of pressure to take as many APs as possible and talk about APs as if more is always better or at least safer in the college admissions process.
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Eye rolling and boredom describe those conversations, as well as stress inducing for those with anxiety (nobody was intentionally vying to be #1). My daughter never found any of it interesting and thankfully it wasn’t happening in her circle.
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Here’re my questions:
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If the colleges want to see course rigor, if the AP courses in a high school are deemed to be “the most rigorous” courses offered by that high school, and if most students who took those courses got “good” grades, how do you keep kids from signing up for these courses?
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If a high school puts kids with different preparations and abilities in a given subject in the same and relatively harder AP class, wouldn’t some students feel more stressed while others don’t, unless tests, homework and/or grading are adjusted to accommodate everyone?
I had a parent once ask me how many APs my kid was taking. I found the question bizarre. No one has before or since asked me this question.
Also, I didn’t know the answer to this question until we got to application season, and counted them as a matter of curiosity.
To this day, my parents couldn’t answer this question. They wouldn’t know what an AP class is if Trevor Packer knocked on their door and handed them the syllabi.
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