<p>Based on what I know from my two college age boys and their friends:</p>
<p>Very few surprises, if you look objectively at what they actually did in high school, not just at their high school GPAs.</p>
<p>For the most part, regardless of what colleges they ended up attending, high school and college grades have had a high correlation. SAT and ACT scores have not been indicative of anything once they get to college.</p>
<p>The exceptions to this generality have been:</p>
<p>A couple of very smart kids who did a minimum amount of work in HS, but managed to pull off pretty good grades, bombed in college because they had not developed the work habits or study skills they needed for college level work. These are the kids whose friends could have predicted this, but whose parents, heads buried firmly in the sand, were shocked.</p>
<p>A couple of kids who had very mediocre high school grades have done very well in college because they are attending highly structured colleges (one is at The Citidel, one is a member of a military-like corps at a larger university). The structure of the school setting has been the key in not allowing them to fail if they put forth the effort. These kids WANTED to attend these schools, they seemed to understand at some deep level that they needed external structure. Their parents did NOT “send” them there to “fix” anything.</p>
<p>A couple of kids have found themselves working very hard for B’s and C’c at very tippy top universities. It has been a shock to those kids who were always at the top of the class to be average now. Not a bad thing, but an adjustment for them.</p>