Course selection Strategy:more AP or for High rank

Parent Cafe
61

<p>That is a good point 2collegewego – at my daughter’s large public HS in LA (were exactly half go on to 4 yr colleges and half to 2 year) the top 2% (eight) enrolled in CHYMPS this year. The top 10% (52) enrolled in Top 40 schools.</p>

<p>So, at HER high school, being top 20% doesn’t paint a very good picture. Across town at Harvard Westlake, being top 10-20% could possibly qualify a student for CHYMPS.</p>

<p>But back to the point of this thread – not taking 7-10 AP level courses at either school (since they are offered in abundance at both) would knock a kid right out of contention for CHYMPS.</p>

62

<p>Pizzagirl wrote: “What if your hs only offers a handful of AP classes, mostly senior-year courses?”</p>

<p>I see your question as having two components –</p>

<p>1) does the HS only having a few AP classes hurt the applicant’s chances for admittance to the most selective colleges?</p>

<p>2) does the HS only having a few AP classes hurt the applicant’s chances to do well in competition with students who HAVE taken a lot of AP courses, when both kinds of students are enrolled in the most selective colleges (assuming (1) is not an issue).</p>

<p>In answer to 1), all that I have read tells me that it does not knock a student out of contention who was at the very top of the class in a school not offering many APs. But it does not help. How can the adcom be assured the applicant can handle (intelligence, emotional stability, time management)a truly rigorous course load as is normal as a Top 10 school?</p>

<p>In answer to 2), here is where the real problem emerges. Imagine if you will taking a very athletic, coordinated, motivated girl from a recreational league All-Star soccer team, and inserting her into a nationally ranked Club soccer team – you know, the kind that practices for three hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and plays all day both weekend days in tournaments, 10 months out of the year?</p>

<p>While the athletic, coordinated, motivated rec All-Star may have every bit the potential (and possibly more) of the girls playing Club for 2-3 seasons already, the gap in preparation is ENORMOUS. The club girls have over 10,000 hours of preparation under their belts, while the rec Allstar maybe 1000. Almost to the point that the All-Star can never catch up. feels out of place, and for the first time in her athletic life, like a failure.</p>

<p>Now consider the applicant from the school that is not academically rigorous. They may have all the innate potential in the world, but there is a real possibility that in freshman year of college, there are not enough hours in the day to catch up to the students who have been busting their hind ends for four years in an academically rigorous high school, where they have competed against each other for three years in 7-10 AP courses.</p>

<p>Would it be fair to the rec Allstar, or the highly intelligent but poorly prepared student, to put them in an environment where they will have trouble catching up?</p>

<p>The adcoms have no interest in betting on potential… .that is risky. And nobody wants a great, intelligent kid who is not adequately prepared, to wash out freshman year of college!</p>

63

<p>That’s a nice argument, Dunnin, but I think it’s about 180 degrees from what most adcomms think, at least at places like Harvard and Yale. (Actually, I believe they think both what you say and its opposite – they hedge their bets to a large extent, by admitting kids of both types.)</p>

<p>I believe that, with the possible exception of a very, very few schools (Harvard Westlake probably among them), the admissions committees at elite colleges are not terribly impressed with the quality of ANYONE’s high school education, and thus they believe that a talented, raw kid CAN catch up, and quickly, too. Everyone has to learn a new way of thinking, no matter how challenging their high-school curriculum was. (My wife’s experience, by the way, supports that theory. She went to Yale from a terrible, semi-rural high school where only about 20% of the class went to four-year college, all but four or five of them to mediocre local public colleges. She had never written a paper more than three pages long, had no calculus, effectively no foreign language, etc. She felt completely unprepared for college. She was elected to PBK as a junior, graduated summa cum laude, and was a significant campus leader.)</p>

<p>Look at the math courses they offer. If they took the approach you suggest, there would be no call to have any sub-calculus math classes; there might even be no call to offer basic calculus. But all of the elite colleges offer both a slow version of basic calculus and basic pre-calculus. SOMEONE is taking those courses, and it’s not the kids from Harvard Westlake with 5s on their Calculus BC APs.</p>

64

<p>imathriver wrote: “I attend a competitive private school and decided to take the most competitive classes throughout high school. My GPA was low, around a 3.5 unweighted, and my rank was really low, especially for top colleges. I think it hovered around top 20%. However, I had great test scores, good ec’s, and wrote good essays. I ended up getting into … Duke”</p>

<p>I’m wondering whether taking all those AP courses helped to prepare you to get “great test scores”. What do you think? </p>

<p>I’m not trying to make a point, btw, that is an honest question. Is it possible that while taking more than 10 AP may hurt gpa, it may help to get very high test scores?</p>

65

<p>JHS – why would an adcom take that risk? I do understand the compelling desire to have a well rounded and interesting class, and the general public service mandate that most universities feel to educate every segment of the population. However, I think it is possible to find rigorously prepared applicants from every religion, race, geography, SES, hobby, and interest… enough so that the adcom has no reason to accept ill prepared applicants into the freshman class.</p>

<p>Unless you consider diversity to be the class of people called “poorly prepared”? I’ll grant that there are, as in my athlete example, kids who are so astoundingly athletic (let’s define that as testing off the charts on speed, strength, hand/eye, etc.), that they actually CAN catch up with some extra attention over a season’s time. But that is so very rare.</p>

66

<p>Hey, AP scores in no way affect SAT scores. Trust me, they really have nothing to do with one another. Hope that helps!</p>

67

<p>JHS is correct that even Harvard offers precalculus courses to some of its freshmen. That’s not a course for credit, but it’s a course that some Harvard freshmen (how many?) take. Are those freshmen deemed to have good potential, even though they had lousy preparation in high school, because they had high test scores?</p>

68

<p>I think the question to ponder might be to know how successful JHS wife is in comparison to students who were from the competitive schools and much better prepared when got into Yale.
I’m from school of thought that believe early education is the basis of success; so the better you prepared during your elementary/middle/high school the better career or future you will have.
It is possible that a less prepared student can benefit from Yale but a highly prepared high school student will flourish irrespective of the school they endup for undergrad.</p>

69

<p>JHS, I think you hit it on the head when you said they accept both kinds of students.</p>

<p>If you are coming from a school where lots of kids go to competitive schools, you are probably best off having a profile like they do-- mainly As but some Bs probably won’t kill you (because they know your school adequately prepares you) and high SATs. If you come from a school where the educational level is lower, you need to show great <em>potential</em> and, from what I’ve seen on the Amherst list (Amherst being a school that values economic diversity), that seems to look like ALL As despite mediocre SATs. I think it could also mean high SATs with a lower gpa but most of the students I’ve seen fall into the “#1 in their class at inner-city or rural schools.” I don’t think the top schools accept too many kids like this (or their average SATs would be lower than what we see) but some schools value such students for what they bring into the classroom.</p>

70

<p>“I think the question to ponder might be to know how successful JHS wife is in comparison to students who were from the competitive schools and much better prepared when got into Yale.”</p>

<p>What do you define as success? Without picking on JHS’ wife, whom I know nothing about, but just running with this example … suppose she’s a stay-at-home mother who is active in the PTA. Or suppose she is a minister and doesn’t make a lot of money but loves what she does. Or suppose she opened her own knitting shop or yoga studio. Or suppose she decided to become a physical therapist. Or suppose she started a dog-photography business (I know someone who went to Harvard who did this.) Or suppose she’s a hotshot lawyer. Or suppose she’s an investment banker. Would only some of those outcomes to her Yale education define her as successful? Because I sense that success gets defined as money, and I think that’s very sad.</p>

71

<p>I can’t say too much about my wife without outing her (for which I don’t have permission), but she’s had a very successful career in public policy bouncing between government and the nonprofit sector. She’s well known nationally in her area of substantive expertise. </p>

<p>Trust me, she has been successful by any standard that doesn’t require winning a Nobel Prize or amassing millions of dollars. She has public service awards out the wazoo.</p>

<p>I was thinking about this thread last night. The three people I knew who had the most academic trouble in college, two of whom failed to graduate, had gone to St. Paul’s, Groton and Milton, respectively. (Two of the three cases involved substantial substance abuse issues, too.) I also knew a recruited athlete from a semi-rural public school who flirted with flunking out his first year, but then got it together. </p>

<p>On the other hand – and consistent with my wife’s experience – I also knew a recruited athlete from public school in Nowhere New Mexico (not Los Alamos, or anywhere near it, or even Albuquerque), and a kid from a troubled small-city public school in Connecticut, both of whom wound up as presidents of their high-prestige law reviews and then clerked for the Supreme Court. Highly motivated, poorly prepared students did just fine.</p>

72

<p>I went to a mediocre high school. I attended a summer program (only knew about it because my dad was a GC in another city, it was modeled after the St Pauls program for public school students in my state) where I was able to compare my HS with those in the rich towns and saw what was lacking. There were no APs and I had no formal CS classes (my first time I touched a computer was at this summer program before sr year and then I did stuff on my own during sr year) yet I was accepted at Cornell Engineering and majored in CS. Nowadays, besides the higher admission standards in general, I can’t imagine an engineering student going in without any AP classes or a CS major beginning from the start and ending up majoring in it. They would be so far behind their classmates most of whom I assume will place out of many first year courses. I was able to take a placement test and place out of 1st sem calc but that was all I tried.</p>

<p>For humanities, I don’t see it as great of a problem with most intro college courses not directly mapping to AP/IB classes. However I have heard from the parents of a kid at Georgetown this year who I think is interested in pre-law that the lack of AP bulk he entered with (don’t know the specifics, but is probably also half dozen max) put him at a disadvantage.</p>

<p>My older daughter is a humanities kid and she’ll have probably 6 APs when she graduates (one self-study.) The school offers 11 currently, half are language ones, and will drop to 9 after 2 language ones are dropped after next year. For her I’m not too concerned. My younger daughter is currently interested in math, I’ll have to see how it goes with her, there are 3 math APs but there are no science or econ APs. The school says several kids go to engineering schools but I’d like to hear more about how they are making out.</p>

73

<p>Before one assumes that a single C or a handful of B’s eliminates a student from consideration at the “top schools”, let me offer up my neighbor’s daughter from a few years back.</p>

<p>Taking 4 AP classes in her Junior year, takes and passes with 4s and 5s all 4 tests - and then decides to check out for rest of school year. Parents are still enjoying the 1960s - and allow her to be a free spirit. She gets 2 Cs and 2 Bs in the AP classes (A’s in her other classes somehow).</p>

<p>She is admitted to both UCLA and Berkeley. Very high SAT scores, varsity athlete (ran in Olympic trials for marathon this year), great ECs - everything you would want in an applicant - except this one month in her Junior year.</p>

<p>Weird stuff just happens - and my guess is that the Adcoms could read past that lapse in performance.</p>

74

<p>I’ve had a total of 3 C’s and MANY MANY B’s on my transcript. However, I showed a lot of improvement and got straight A’s my junior year. I had above average test scores. I’m going to Duke next year.</p>

<p>keep the faith and be honest in your essays.</p>

75

<p>C grades may not prevent one from being admitted, especially if there are other compensating qualities. However, they will eliminate you from top scholarship contention at highly selective schools. I know a couple of very strong students who stumbled in only a single class for a single semester. Everything else was stellar. The only merit consideration received was from lower tier schools. They made inquiries, and among those who gave them honest feedback it kept coming back to the fact they got a C during one semester. The adcoms would say they completely understood there were extenuating conditions, but they just had so many applicants with unblemished records that they couldn’t put them into the competitive scholarship pool.</p>

76

<p>Here are a couple of QAs from Washington University website for your reference:</p>

<p>Does Washington University take into account the rigor of an academic program, the rigor of a school’s grading system, or the difference between weighted and unweighted grade point averages or ranks in class?</p>

<pre><code>* The academic rigor, high school’s grading system, whether GPAs and/or ranks are weighted or unweighted are all taken into account when reviewing each student’s application. We evaluate each student’s academic record in the context of what is available to them in their particular high school.
</code></pre>

<p>Is it better to take an advanced class in high school and get a B, or take the regular course and get an A?</p>

<pre><code>* It is better to take the advanced class and try to get an A. If you get a B in the advanced class, that’s fine, too. Your main goal should be to challenge yourself in high school so that you’ll be better prepared for the academic challenges in college.
</code></pre>

77

<p>If the adcoms “really consider the high school” does it help you or hurt you to be at a high school like this:

  • no AP offered
  • IB offered
  • Title I (low income) school, but not inner city
  • approx. 60 - 70% graduation rate, and of those who graduate, approx. 50% attend 4 year college/university</p>
78

<p>I hope that the adcoms consider the high school! My D’s prep school has not graduated a 4.0 in 3 years.</p>