@cobrat, fair enough, I’m ~10 yrs younger than you and I even chuckled a little at 690, pretty sure the classes were significantly bigger than that in the mid 2000s. Either way, 25 is not 30+ (does CC no longer convert emoticons? I’m trying to do a devil smiley)
@roethlisburger we’ve had this convo before - I know. We always considered ourselves better than them. (multiple devil smileys)
At my college (a STEM school), some of the students that had been top of their class at small rural schools had a tough time adjusting to college rigor. OK…in honestly, we all had a tough time. But those that were accustomed to getting good grades with minimal effort and were seeing calc for the first time struggled more.
Regarding Stuyvesant,
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/upshot/when-the-college-admissions-battle-starts-at-age-3.html
Keep in mind the 690 were those of us who made it to senior year. My graduating class started 9th grade with 950 students* but we had ~ a 28% attrition rate mostly between 9-10th grade because students decided the academic rigor/workload and/or expectations were too high and opted to transfer back to their zoned high schools or in the case of the upper-east sider set…switched to one of the NYC area/NE private day/boarding schools where it wasn’t nearly as “sink or swim”.
When I attended Stuy, there was a much higher percentage of URMs attending and Asian/Asian-Americans had just started to exceed 50% of the student body.
Also, most of us were immigrant/first-generation Americans and eligible for free/reduced price lunches with the notable exception of the upper-east sider set. The Asian/Asian-American majority at such schools are still mostly low-income immigrant/first generation Americans…especially those from Flushing which unlike the other two named neighborhoods isn’t a wealthy enclave. Quite the opposite, in fact though gentrification has started to affect it as well.
While I’d admit Stuy and BxSci can be cutthroat and sink or swim, that rep was well known to most applicants long before they opted to take the exam or accept their admission offer. .
Incidentally, from talking to some relatives, college classmates, and colleagues who attended private day/boarding schools…including the NE elite boarding schools…the impression I got was that they were far from being pressure cookers.
In fact, some went out of their way to nurture…sometimes even coddling their students which caused them issues in undergrad and sometimes post-college as I observed with some older college classmates*.
None of my Stuy teachers would have entertained the idea of providing an extension unless there was a drastic medical emergency or something similarly severe. One teacher I had gave the final grade of D to what was an A paper because it was 2 days late.
None of the college/grad school Profs…or even my employers were an equivalently as strict IME…and I’ve worked in firms/supervisors who were sticklers for meeting deadlines.
@roethlisburger @iwannabe_Brown
FWIW, HS undoubtably suffer from the same “fudgable” SAT stats that college’s common data reporting does x10 but there have been a few articles/studies that claim to have “average” SAT for top schools. (most in the last 2 years are based on Niche’s rankings, fwiw. Niche does a couple of different private HS rankings that shuffle the deck a little. Haven’t looked that closely at what the difference are.)
Bus Insider did an article back in 2015 that had (old) SAT range. A decent # of top schools were in the 2140-2210 range, apparently
http://www.businessinsider.com/smartest-private-high-schools-in-the-us-2015-3/#-belmont-hill-school–belmont-massachusetts-14
Niche claims to know Harker and Trinity top out private school SAT 16 with 1480 each.
There’s a private school website that reports SATs that are obviously self-reported or at least not officially reported (and in some cases obviously wrong. A few parachiol schools show “average” SAT scores in the 1580 range… hm.)
Anyway, let the battle continue!
Re #76:
The threshold for admission to the selective NYC publics is a test.
I suppose the tests might reflect some cultural biases, to some extent. And maybe could be prepared for. I really don’t know.
The threshold for admission to Hunter Elementary, which is for Kindergarten I believe, is an IQ test. I forget if it was Stanford-Binet or Wechsler.
At the time it was relevant for our kids, one had to score above some threshold (99%ile? don’t remember) on the IQ test to make the initial cut. Then they have the kids in and do a bunch of activities, to see how they function in a group setting, show leadership, take direction, etc. They then selected the class from that pool.
Again, to the extent that the test procedures incorporate cultural bias this could possibly seep in. And again, I don’t really know. [ But personally I maintain they ARE biased, because MY kid got axed in the last cut, and she’s the best!!! So it can’t have been fair…]
The Hunter alums I know do NOT describe their experience as being a “pressure cooker”. They were highly motivated students in their own right, and aspired to learn. They loved their school, and achieved great things.
As a group many of these people did not come from wealthy families. Many of their college decisions were influenced by where they got the most money.
re#83: The environment at private schools really varies. When we were in the Midwest, the private school one my kids attended had different “tracks” and the top one was quite accelerated. The other school was no more rigorous academically than the higher tracks of the good suburban schools in the area. Attendance there was more a social thing. Though it did have much smaller classes than the public school did.
The NYC privates also vary. The people at Horace Mann always whined about workload. Not so some others.
That hasn’t borne itself out in my area.
My experience is all I have to draw on, of course, and in any case the plural of anecdote is not data. But I will say that my son (Sal, excellent GPA/scores, nationally ranked/ competed internationally in his EC) applied to a handful of schools in the “super selective” range as well as his match schools. After he was denied, we heard from several people that the only kids in our (large metro area) district who get into those particular unis come from one of two schools (one IB, both highly affluent, which ours is not by a long shot), at least for the last ten years.
Discussions with the GC and a friend who does college counseling locally tends to bear that out. Their impression is that, like someone mentioned, the known quantity is preferred.
Could be coincidence, could well be S was denied for perfectly logical reasons unrelated to his high school. He’s happy where he is so I don’t lose sleep over it (and in one case feel he dodged a really big bullet). But one does tend to wonder. And I wish I’d known before I spent money on application fees!
Mmmmmm … maybe, maybe not. I would rather be one of 45 valedictorians in a school that routinely sends 50 kids to top-tier colleges than be the tippy top student of a mid-grade public HS that only sends one kid every 3 or 4 years to a top-tier college. Maybe you aren’t as “special” being one of 45, but the odds of getting where you want to go are much more in your favor.
I’ll refrain from entering the discussion of whether or not NYC public school entry tests are culturally biased, but you can without a doubt prep for them if the kid is willing to do so.
Can’t speak to the boarding schools but at my school, the routine feeling was college - especially the first year or two, was easier than high school. In 8th grade I had a science teacher who had a checklist of formatting items he required on every lab report (things like properly labeled axes, tables with headers, etc) and if you missed any item on the checklist you got a 0 on the report no matter the quality of the rest of it. Actually a very important lesson for a future scientist with how competitive grant applications are.
Nearly every Stuy classmate…even those attending HYPS as STEM majors felt the same.
Only exceptions were those who attended schools like MIT, Caltech, CMU(engineering/CS), JHU, Swat, Reed, UChicago, and Cornell(Engineering/A & S) and schools like them in which they felt the academic rigor/quantity of workload was comparable*.
College being far easier than HS was also my own experience despite the fact I graduated somewhere in the bottom quarter of my graduating class and even my own father was initially concerned I’d likely flunk out of my LAC and lose the near-full ride FA/scholarship package as a result because of the academic rep he heard about it. Still ROTFLOL thinking about that considering what actually transpired in undergrad.
Still managed to graduate with a BS and MS in EE near the top of both respective classes within 4 years and after a stint working in Europe, returned to MIT for his EE PhD. He was one of countless genuine genius-type HS classmates I encountered during my HS years at Stuy.
I’m not surprised by that.
Interesting article about the pressure at STUY
Our son, a rising junior at West Point, still feels college is easier than high school. All of his boarding school friends say the same regardless of the (fine) colleges they attend.