<p>so a notre dame rep came to visit my high school to talk with the prospective students the other day, and maaaan was i happy when she mentioned she knew about our school and how intense it was. "i know how hard a's are to come by here, the committee knows too-don't worry about it.". finally. put my mind at ease after reading about the hundreds of kids on here who had a+'s in everything.</p>
<p>im sure they say that everywhere they go.</p>
<p>the competitive high school thing, imo, is a bunch of crap - at least for purposes of this website. 10 times out of 10 people use the competitive high school line for 2 reasons. 1 they use it to brag, or pretend they have even better grades then they do by saying "i go to a super competitive high school omgggggg i have homework every night and i don't go to bed until midnight" and 2 they use it to justify why they got a random B or some crap by saying "i go to a super competitive high school omgggggg i have homework every night and i don't go to bed until midnight."</p>
<p>I agree wtih Jags861. I have seen admission representatives say that "we know about how hard your highschool is," and "we take that into account in admissions." However, when acceptances and rejections come in, it seems to be harder to get into top schools from our high school than from other schools. For example, no one from our high school got into Brown with less than a 1500 on the old SATs. This is not true for other high schools.
The numbers don't lie,but the admission reps do! Does that surprise you that admission representative lie?</p>
<p>If you don't believe me, just do some research on common data sets for schools. Most of the top schools publish who get admitted and compares this to their class standing. In most top schools, the vast majority of admitted kids were in the top 10% of their high school class and many were in the top 1-2%. These are part of their statistics and are used in rankings. </p>
<p>It was written up here in one of our newspapers that kids that attend magnet schools and very competitive high schools ,which have high SATs scores, have a reduced chance of getting into top schools than kids from less competitive, more diverse schools. In fact, there was a speech given to college administrators and admission's officers whereby colleges were encouraged to give extra points to kids who hail from "diverse schools," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.</p>
<p>Bottom line is that if you attend a tough high school with high SATs and high standards of educational requirements, you probably will be a bit shafted when it comes to admission to top schools. However, you can atleast feel good about the fact that you got a top notch educational background that should enable you to do better in college than many other high school kids.</p>
<p>By the way, here is our naviance url site: <a href="https://connection.naviance.com/fc/signin.php?hsid=wootton%5B/url%5D">https://connection.naviance.com/fc/signin.php?hsid=wootton</a></p>
<p>Click on guest and college lookup. You will see which kids get accepted by both SAT and GPA. Just so you can understand what you are seeing:</p>
<p>An A, B, or C from an Honors or AP course gets an extra point. Thus an "A" in an honors or AP course would be worth 5 points and not just 4 points. A "B:" in an honors or AP would be worth 4 points etc. Only "C's" and above gets this added weight for honors and AP. Take a look at Yale, Brown, Dartmouth etc. You would be amazed how hard it is for our kids to get in there, and we have two magnet programs too. We were also rated in the top 50 high schools by US News this year and was in the top 20 two years ago.</p>
<p>I should note that you should ignore the one or two kids that got in with very low SATs because they may have had a special hook such as recruiting athlete, minority, parent who donated a bundle etc.</p>
<p>Actually, if u r from competitive a high school, and your school has a good track record, the college adcoms know about your school.</p>
<p>So if you’re from famous public schools (Thomas Jefferson, Montgomery Blair,…) or good private schools (Gilman, Lawrenceville,……), you will get some benefits.</p>
<p>Some naysayer may say college admission is a crapshoot, but based on some anecdotal evidences, almost all the college adcoms know what they are doing and most of the time they select best possible candidates…. What I call “uncanny ability” of adcoms</p>
<p>The only Wootton students who get a break during college admissions are those who have done truly spectacular things. In my mind, a great deal of my friends seem to be Ivy material, but come April, the unfortunate truth is that there will be a far greater number of rejection letters coming from "top-notch" institutions than there will be acceptances.</p>
<p>And that is because it is very difficult to stand out here. We don't rank students or have valedictorians.. almost solely for the fact that we might end up with 50+ people at the top of the class if the school ever did decide to implement a ranking policy. </p>
<p>Consider that academics are very strenuous, too; Wootton (and most MCPS schools in general) offers a class for every AP exam in existence. And more than one or two Bs over your entire high school career could easily pull you out of the top 10%.</p>
<p>taxguy, are you a Wootton parent? Actually, for the record, Wootton is not in the top 50 this year (51st place), but we were in the top 20 -last- year, not two years ago. And I'm not sure what you mean by Wootton having any magnet programs; it has none, the county has Richard Montgomery for humanities and Montgomery Blair for math/science to thank for providing them. If you are referring to the STARS and Humanities programs here at Wootton, they are not magnet. Students do not come to Wootton so that they can enter these programs; rather, these programs are there for students who want some sort of recognition by the time they graduate for devotion to particular courses, but it is in no way accelerated or even that meaningful.</p>
<p>Rabban, the people at Blair who go to great colleges would've managed to do the same no matter which high school they attended in the area. There is no "brand-name" benefit from attending Blair, especially since not the entire school is enrolled in the magnet program. In fact, the other half of the students tends to do so poorly (Blair is in the ghettos) by MCPS standards that the school never manages to do well in the Newsweek rankings. On the other hand, the Blair magnet program has a grading policy in which only a limited number of students from a class can receive As, so there is another added disadvantage for Blair students. Granted, going to Blair might be handy for those immediate, additional resources involving math and science, but any motivated student can easily find good resources from their own school.</p>
<p>
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So if you’re from famous public schools (Thomas Jefferson, Montgomery Blair,…) or good private schools (Gilman, Lawrenceville,……), you will get some benefits.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>As a Jefferson alum I can say that it definitely does help, no matter how many students complain about how smart you have to be to be one of the "few" (re: 15) students to go to Princeton/MIT/whatever.</p>
<p>"And that is because it is very difficult to stand out here. We don't rank students or have valedictorians.. almost solely for the fact that we might end up with 50+ people at the top of the class if the school ever did decide to implement a ranking policy."</p>
<p>Happens at WJ too. Is it a moco policy to not rank?</p>
<p>we only have ap classes in calc, french/spanish, and computer. </p>
<p>this is because all of our classes are regarded as "honors". if we want to take an ap, (which most seniors graduate with 4-7 tests min under their belt) we sign up for it, go to the teacher, and organize a study session if we really want. otherwise we study on our own. some crazy high stat (like 90, 95%) of students taking aps get 4's and 5's, and most of those are 5's. another reason we claim not to want ap classes is so that we dont have to "teach to the test". the classes, however, that are ap have insane statistics for scores. </p>
<p>first day of bc calc for me: teacher put up number of students getting 5's, 4's, 3's etc... out of 40 kids taking the class 35 got 5's, 3 got 4's, 1 got a 3 and 1 got a 2.</p>
<p>the point to this being that we dont get a higher grading scale (out of 5) for different classes. all of our classes are weighted the same, even advanced language classes (we have reg classes and adv classes for each level).</p>
<p>Kryptonsa36, yes, I was a Wootton parent and am glad that all my kids have finally left there. Also, you are correct in that if a kid gets two or three "B's" in their career, they probably won't be in the top 10% of their class because of all of the high achievers.</p>
<p>As for their magnet program, yes, it is an internal magnet program unlike that of Blair,which is county sponsored. However, it is comparable to county wide programs in many ways. For example, they have very tough requirements for graduation including a senior independent project ( whch involved both an oral and written presentation and an oral defense in front of faculty) and kids get a different diploma from that of the normal county diploma for those that graduate in the humanities program. It is NOT just for special recognition upon graduation. Also, like a magnet program, there is also a special overview of the program that gets sent to colleges.</p>
<p>Finally, kids in these programs have, in my opinion, as much accellerated access to courses and programs as that of any magnet program. They have the college institue, which brings college professors to Wootton for actual college courses or they can take any course at Montgomery College and have that count for credit. I have seen kids take Chinese 6, Differential Equations, Statics, etc.</p>
<p>I don't know much about their Stars program;thus, I can't compare that to the county wide magnet programs. In a sense, it is akin to the honors program provided at many colleges. It is for this reason, among other reasons, that relatively few Wootton kids elect to attend Blair or Richard Montgomery.</p>
<p>Kyptonssa36, also made a very important point regarding tough high schools. Very few of our kids got admitted to the really top colleges. If you check out the ivys and MIT, Caltech, Chicago, Williams and a few of the top LACS, you will see very few Wootton kids going there or even geting admitted there. This certainly supports my thesis that attending tough public high schools with lots of competition can actually work against kids who want to get into ivys and other top schools such as MIT. Our only major successes are with Cornell, CMU, and UVA ( surprisingly), Michigan, and Maryland. </p>
<p>As an example, we had one kid get into MIT out of the dozen or so who applied and who were really top notch. We had none get into MIT within the previous two years. We had none get into Harvard or Yale this year despite the many kids, including two twins where had 4.0 GPAs with solid SATs, and none got into Williams. In fact,Yale hasn't accepted any kid from Wootton in three years despite over 60 appliclants over the past three years. None have gotten into Swarthmore and none got into Amherst. </p>
<p>I don't know if Wootton is indicative of other top public high schools,but if it is, the lesson is that attending a tough public high school can be very detrimental to your college admission chances.</p>
<p>As for Thomas Jefferson, I think that they and a few schools like them are treated differently from that of almost any other school when it comes to admission because of their unusually high average SAT scores and because they were rated number one in the country by US News and World Report.</p>
<p>My school pretty much disproves that. Out of the 400 or so kids in the senior class, 28 went to Ivies. We also had several to other top schools including washustl, jhu, chicago,berkeley,michigan,emory,nyu, etc.</p>
<p>It really depends on the school. Wootton is a great school. Probably better than my school. Dont know why they have such bad luck.</p>
<p>No ranking is a MoCo-wide policy.</p>
<p>Wootton's graduating Class of '06 seemed to fare less well than in previous years I have seen. The school didn't have any problems sending kids to Michigan, JHU (in-state admissions benefits), CMU, and WashU (which accepted a huge chunk of students after literally never having a single student attend in a decade), but (of course, except in the case of Cornell) but not have a noticeable amount of people accepted to the Ivies. In the case of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined, I think only one person is attending one of the three (Yale, I believe). One student was accepted to Harvard, but opted for MIT instead.</p>
<p>Wootton has been offering MVC/Differential Equations at school for several years now, as well as Chinese 6 (and AP Chinese in addition). But the way things are working out now, attending a College Institute course usually requires students to commute to WJ (?). And don't forget about the oppourtunity to study at Thomas Edison School of Technology and learn carpentry or plumbing! -_-</p>
<p>I know I chose Wootton over MoCo's magnets not only so that I wouldn't have to get up earlier to get to school but also because Wootton is perfectly well-rounded in academics, while Blair and RM have their deficiencies in everything they're not known for. And Wootton does has its share of victories over Blair in the science-student-oriented world.</p>
<p>I'm not sure about this, but my personal take on Wootton academics is that they are far too demanding, leaving most students without much time to pursue a lot of other "hooks." Balancing straight-As with great SAT scores and being tennis captain is no longer good enough, unless you happen to be nationally ranked (of which Wootton has very very very few). </p>
<p>Or.. Wootton just hasn't recently attracted a good number of the best-of-the-best students who can really excel in addition to having to live in a strenuous environment.</p>
<p>You may be right Krypton. Maybe Wootton's stenuous work requirements are a reason that more kids don't have more outstanding ECs,which in turn can hurt them in admission.</p>
<p>As for College Institute courses, kids do NOT have to travel to WJ. Trust me on this since my daughter took two of them. </p>
<p>Also as you noted, why would anyone want to travel 45 minutes each way to a public magnet program when they can attend Wootton with little or no travel required. As far as the IVYS, check out Harvard and Yale. None got in within the last three years. We have been very unluck regarding both the IVYs and with MIT, and the top LACs. Maybe your reason is the cause of this problem. I can tell you that my daughter just graduated this year in the Humanities program, and she worked like a dog all year between College Institute courses, Montgomery College courses, pit orchestra and especially finishing her senior independent project, not to mention college applications.</p>
<p>Does going to competitive high schools give you an advantage when you apply to schools that are less competitive. (where the admit rate is like over 60%)</p>
<p>bball16, I think it depends on the school. Generally the less competitive schools admit by the numbers, which is based on either class rank, GPA and SAT. If class rank is a major factor, being in a competitive school can be detrimental to that of a less competitive one for good students. If admission is based on GPA or SAT, being in a competitive school might have an advantage.</p>
<p>"On the other hand, the Blair magnet program has a grading policy in which only a limited number of students from a class can receive As, so there is another added disadvantage for Blair students." -kryptonsa36</p>
<p>Absolutely false. There are many magnet classes where everyone gets an A. Even the hard ones don't limit the number of As.</p>
<p>
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Maybe Wootton's stenuous work requirements are a reason that more kids don't have more outstanding ECs,which in turn can hurt them in admission.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well here at Richard Montgomery take APs beginning Freshmen Year (only if you're in the IB Program that is). Our work requirements involve finishing the IB Requirements along with the county and states. Did I forget to mention ToK, CAS and EE? Beat that ;)</p>
<p>This reminds of the "My dad's better than your dad" stuff!</p>
<p>Just a question, Why is Blair talked more on CC than RM?</p>
<p>because blair is better :)</p>
<p>I love the self-delusion Blair students have ;) :) :D</p>
<p>Public magnet HS here</p>
<p>~60 Ivy Acceptances (10 Princeton, 12 Columbia, 4 Yale, 2 Harvard, 5 MIT) etc. out of a class of ~300.</p>
<p>It definitely helps.</p>