<p>I encouraged my daughter (junior) for taking more AP and advanced classes in a southern public school where no one cares about difficult courses. I believe she did well. However recently we found out her ranking (unweighted) is somewhere between top 15 and 20% which I don't think this will make her to go to good schools ( she aims national universities like Northwestern, Emory, UNC, etc). If the school ranks the student as weighted, she would go up to top 5%. Also we know that the number one student did not even take one AP course. My question is: did we make wrong strategy for more difficult courses?</p>
<p>Probably not. You also want the GC to note that your daughter took a demanding course load. What I would suggest is to ask if the GC would write something like this in her recommendation, “XXX School does not weight grades, however if we did, this student would be ranked in the top 5% of the class.”</p>
<p>Mathmom, Thanks for your reply. I have heard some public or private high schools do not rank student. Is it risky to transfer my daughter to one of those schools. So her rank can be covered? Is GC school counselor?</p>
<p>I wouldn’t worry about it and I certainly wouldn’t think about transferring your daughter over this issue. </p>
<p>Two things about the kinds of colleges that your daughter likes:</p>
<p>(a) They don’t particularly care how the high school does its rankings. They know high schools have different ranking systems, so they make their own assessments of grades. The GC’s letter generally includes a standard data sheet on the high school, which lets the college know everything it needs to know to disregard the high school’s ranking.</p>
<p>(b) Regardless of ranking, if an applicant hasn’t taken a challenging curriculum – or better yet the most challenging curriculum available – then the applicant isn’t even a serious candidate. Your daughter should be much better off in the top 20% with a challenging curriculum than in the top 1% without it.</p>
<p>This isn’t an unusual situation. The college admissions committees know how to evaluate candidates; that’s why they’re there.</p>
<p>One cautionary note, however. Unless the high school is very strong or very small, being in the top 5% of students taking a challenging curriculum is not so special if she is applying to places like Northwestern or UNC (as an out-of-state student). I don’t think her application would be thrown out if she’s not in the top 1-2%, but you ought to be giving a lot of thought to safety schools, too.</p>
<p>Also, I would worry less about what the GC says (as long as he sends the school’s data) and more about finding teachers who will write enthusiastic, detailed recommendations based on personal knowledge.</p>
<p>It is difficult, if not impossible, for students who do NOT take a rigorous curriculum to get into top universities, so no, you did not steer your daughter in the wrong direction. </p>
<p>To get into a top university- 1. take a rigorous curriculum, 2. get good grades. Of course, there are other things that go into the mix, but those two things must be there to be competitive in today’s college market. Those students who are ranked higher than your daughter who did NOT take a rigorous curriculum are going to find themselves in a precarious position come application time.</p>
<p>Every guide book I have been reading says colleges would rather see a B in a difficult course than an A in an easy course. I am in the NE, but I think that would be true for anywhere. Are the courses labeled on your high school’s transcript as AP? Your GC should be able to tell you that also. My son is a junior and taking more IB courses this year at the suggestion of his GC. She said that even if his grades dropped a little( which they did) It shows a willingness to challenge himself. Good Luck!</p>
<p>JHS, thanks for your detailed comments!</p>
<p>doubleplay, thanks. It’s really hard to take a rigorous curriculum in a school offers only 5, 6 APs which including three language courses. My daughter took half of her APs online, this made her even harder to get helps if needed.</p>
<p>LongeyeMom, Thanks! I think school labeled courses on high school’s transcript as AP.</p>
<p>Of course some colleges would like to see A’s in the hard courses. ;)</p>
<p>GC, is just short for guidance counselor. </p>
<p>No need to transfer to a school that doesn’t rank if you are happy with the education your daughter is receiving now. Most schools send a pretty detailed explanation of how their grading systems work. You can ask to see what your school sends. Our school’s cover sheet lists average SAT scores, lists the AP’s that are offered, the number of AP Scholars, explains our (very strange) weighting system, gives some demographics for the school and a whole slew of other information, that helps put the student in context.</p>
<p>Dual-enrollment might be another option if the logistics aren’t bad. Our son started taking university courses part-time at 15 (one of them was a graduate math course) and he would have had two to two and a half years of college credits had he stayed healthy. We’re working on getting our daughter in a CC class for the summer (she’s 15). It’s a nice way for the kids to get exposed to the college environment, workload and pace without the pressure of a full courseload.</p>
<p>BCEagle91, Thanks for your suggestions.</p>
<p>Ask to see your high school profile – it’s something sent to every college your daughter will apply to. If it doesn’t make reference to the grading system, then you might want to suggest it be changed.</p>
<p>I don’t think you suggested the wrong strategy – the goal is to be well-educated, and that’s what your daughter achieved. Unfortunately, depending on the college and on what your GC writes, yes, it could have an impact on admissions. There are some schools that really like to accept kids in the top 10 percent.</p>
<p>Also, there are scholarships/merit awards that have cut-offs based on rank or percentile. Others know more than I do about that.</p>
<p>I’ll repeat what mathmom wrote – make sure the GC indicates that her rank would have been higher if the grades had been weighted.</p>
<p>Our HS does weigh AP classes, along with our Cambridge classes. The problem is that we have open enrollment. That mean anyone can sign up – no testing or any other requirements. The classes are tough. The teachers give lots of work. And these kids who are not ready for the demanding requirements struggle all year. They often bomb the AP exams. Our size keeps us from offering honors classes. </p>
<p>Colleges want to see rigor, but they do not want to see a kid struggle so much that he cannot succeed. There is a mom who works with me who pulled her son out of AP. The kid wanted to play sports, not do the classwork. Now, he wants to go to a top school and cannot figure out why it is a reach for him. </p>
<p>I wanted to add that our school only weighs an AP if you take the exam. The bad thing about this is that we have the AP calculus exam in the morning, and a good portion of the kids are taking it. All will get 1s. No one prepared for it. And they do not care. They just want the weight for their GPA and class ranking. What a way to blow $80!</p>
<p>Look at the web sites of the colleges you think your child will apply to and see which AP classes count for credit with high enough scores.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I can’t fathom how a student could be passing an AP math or science class, and then take the exam and make a “1” (unless he just botched the test up). At our high school, the math and science APs were challenging to the point that students who made B’s and C’s in them would score 4’s and 5’s on the exam- they were that hard. There is something wrong with the teaching and grading practices of the TEACHER if students are passing the course but failing the exam. As a parent, if I knew of classes where this was happening, I’d definitely have questions for the administration. Cases like that suggest grade inflation, which undermines the credibility of your transcript.</p>
<p>It probably depends on the metric. If the metric is the number of students taking AP courses in the school, then their grades don’t matter. Calc BC is squeezing three semesters into one and a half semesters with half a semester for test prep. That’s a lot of material to absorb in half the normal time for science and engineering majors and I think that many that do well on the AP may be better off taking Calc 2 and 3 in college.</p>
<p>From a learning perspective, I think that doing the traditional college course would be better than the AP approach but there is so much pressure to get AP credentials. I’ve always told my son to enjoy the learning and don’t worry so much about the grades. His perspective is that’s easy for me to say. We have a dozen calculus texts on my bookshelf at home so he’s had a lot of different looks at calculus which I think has been a benefit.</p>
<p>A) On the evaluation forms counselors will fill out, they have to mark if the rank is weighted or unweighted.</p>
<p>B) A “B” in AP Calc looks much better than an A in regular statistics</p>
<p>C) Take it from someone who was weight-listed at UNC with a top-1.5% ranking in my class and a top-25% ACT score with TONS of leadership stuff: getting into any top school is a crapshoot. It will come down to more than rank, and even though that sounds important right now, in reality they DO look at the whole individual. I was admitted to 5/6 of the top-25 ranked schools I applied to. UNC was the only one that didn’t admit me (took name off WL). But if your daughter is motivated, she’ll get into some great schools, rest-assured. It’s just one of those things that always works out. </p>
<p>Best of luck!!!</p>
<p>I recommend retaking math and science when you get into college, regardless of AP, if you are doing something like engineering or premed, or where the courses are prerequisites for others. My kids both scored 5’s on the AP Calc exams, as did a lot of their friends, and they both said the same class (Calc I/II) at their university is taught at a higher level and covers more in depth material, and it would be a bad idea to skip over those classes and go into higher levels. This is coming from a kid who tutors math at the university teaching center.</p>
<p>Many colleges will give a math placement test that augment info that an AP score will do. As Carnegie Mellon says, it’s all very well to get a 5 on the AP exam, but if you can’t pass our placement test in July you probably don’t remember it well enough. My experience (eons ago) was that my high school BC class covered exactly the same material as second semester calculus at Harvard. I repeated it because I got a 2 on the exam.</p>