I do not think this is standard practice @mom2and .
@mom2and, yes, D16 has personally seen it happen, and it bothers her deeply.
The whole “collusion” discussion is interesting, since the IB strongly encourages group work, and while “you do 1-14 and I’ll do 16-32” idea is frowned upon in AP, I see a different approach in IB where the kids are all working together (with the teacher’s approval) to all get to the same level of knowledge.
Some days I feel like the world is just completely jacked up when it comes to understanding cheating versus a rising tide raises all ships…
If they are going to an elite school, it is not likely that the AP exam will get them out of required biology, chemistry, or physics classes, at least not for most students intending a STEM major, or pre-med. Some will be able to start with more advanced calc classes but most will repeat material in at least one class in the series.
In the past ten years, it does seem that there is more parental pressure to move more students into accelerated math classes, or catch them up over summers before starting college. Part of this, I think, is not just the result of the admissions arms race but a response to older students reporting that college calculus instruction at many schools favors students with prior exposure.
@mom2and I do not know if a “standard” exists. My school just listed GPA spread for the entire class, which IME is much more typical.
There are only 6000 middle schoolers who take AP tests nationally.
http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/ap/data/participation/ap-2015
There are always a few kids who just are brilliant, but MIT may take your ordinary mortal kid too once they fill the brilliant mind category. CalTech may only take these kids … but that is their little universe.
Student score distributions show that only 50K students nationally take PhysicsC-mechanics exam.
I guess if you live in Cambridge, Berkeley, near Caltech, or some of the high % college grad districts nationally, you could have met one or two of these kids. Our district offers tutoring by county school board PhDs for these students but you are way ahead of anyone I know of (some 3 or 4 years advanced in math, physics not so much).
The next Einstein needs to come from somewhere … and we need a few every generation.
Study groups serve a purpose for many kids, but won’t get you valedictorian and likely are not saving time (more likely just making studying a more social and therefore enjoyable experience and maybe eliminating some busy work, although the looking things up sample given is really just a googling exercise nowadays, or should be (are they photocopying sources or what?). Cheating is when you all copy the homework from a common paper, but many teachers and certainly professors know exactly how to spot this (how hard can it be if the solutions look identical).
Also in the 80s, these kids would have left high school after junior year to enroll in Ivy or similar schools and do really well, but I think that path is now limited. Also skipping grades seems frowned upon, although if your kid needs AP in 8th grade, I think high school would be a more appropriate placing (and 9th graders still look like middle schoolers and high school grade affiliation is less important … and I guess if you finish 12th grade at 16 or 17, Ivies/MIT/CalTech will consider you).
[quote brief biographical data on 30 leaders of the American Revolution. [unquote
is one of the dumbest and most tedious assignments I have ever seen (and would be a great google assignment, might be a wikipedia assignment) … or is this supposed to be on-line and library group is turning it into a treasure hunt? How about just opening the good old encylopedia?
AP type question would compare and contrast 2 leaders of the american revolution :->
That was an actual APUSH assignment which was designed to provide background. Test questions were definitely harder and more analytical.
Yes, it is not at all uncommon for middle schoolers to take math and science at the high school. Remember, these kids take intensive enrichment classes all summer long from 8-3, and also attend Saturday and/or Sunday classes during the academic year, so this schedule enables them to advance many levels ahead. When my S was a junior ten years ago, there were two 7th graders in his AP Physics BC class. The numbers have drastically increased each year since then, which is reflected in augmented high school math offerings. The district was having to pay for too many kids to take math classes at the local university until they added higher levels like Multivariable Calculus & Linear Algebra, Differential Equations & Complex Analysis, and then Analysis.
I believe AP Physics 1 …
Sounds like an arms race that someone who is aiming for something other than MIT or CalTech can easily ignore. For the kids who are qualified for these classes, that is a great deal though.
The summer enrichment and Sat/Sun classes goes a bit too far for my kids, who are high achievers. We do other things those days and times … as a family. Now if I had genius kids, maybe I would do it …
Where is this and how many kids participate? If it’s the top 1%, I would just let them go on with this, wouldn’t be participating until we got to 8% or so … I will say that offerings sometimes are just another window dressing to fluff up school rankings …
Honestly, your district sounds like it is competing for way above top 200 USNWR high school level.
I would also keep in mind that many Asian parents tend to believe, correctly or not, that they will be held to higher standards in the admissions game just because they are Asian. I think this could be part of the dynamic at @TheGFG;'s school.
But, I think there is also a pervasive arms race going on in college admissions, graduate and professional school admissions, and employment in career track jobs, that is prompted by scarcity of perceived opportunity. We have also seen this increase in numbers of students taking BC calc at earlier ages over the past ten to fifteen years. It used to be that our high school had trouble filling the BC calc classes because even the MIT bound were content to wait until college. I do not think the students are getting any smarter, just more savvy to how the game is being played.
Interesting observation about the reluctance to skip grades and its later impact on high school curricular offerings.At an age when my kids were juggling multiple AP’s in high school, I had already completed at least a year of college, including a full year of calculus using Apostol as the text, arguably more challenging that what my kids had to learn. I did not however have to sink lots of hours into sports or other EC’s to remain competitive for college admission. Might not have been a bad idea, however, if only from the perspective of developing lifelong recreational skills.
The sad thing is I don’t think we are even in the top 200! It makes me wonder why not…
“Interesting observation about the reluctance to skip grades and its later impact on high school curricular offerings.”
My younger D15 has a very late August birthday. Every single darn day I shoot myself in the metaphorical heart for making her a young sophomore instead of an old freshman. I didn’t realize it would be an issue until middle school, where her academic aptitude did not match her social graces. She’ll never know this, but as a parent I privately kick myself for not giving her that benefit.
Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s books just drove the knife deeper into my heart (even if she’ll never play hockey)/
I am not sure I like GFGs high school description at all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy … we are above 300 and nothing this crazy here. Again, it is great to offer opportunities, but if it becomes the new normal … not so much. If you are in the TJ category of rigor, maybe you are not considering that your college placement might be above average, so that while team captain and pasta party champion may be derigor for NHS or top 1%, top 40 schools may be perfectly willing to take a much above average top 5% at your school vs some other school. What does Naviance tell you? Be aware that many Ivies now accept no one from very highly ranked high schools or even districts in a given year.
Dragon mom … kids are different, so D15 might not have had social graces at grade level either. If she is thriving academically, that is a great thing, and you will see how she develops … those social graces can come at any time (including at college, where the low social grace people find each other and their social graces are at least adequate for their social group (a social engineer is below a non-social marketing major in social behavior)). Also some high schools and certainly middle schools are only really pleasurable for 25% of the students due to cliques and other behavior that is anti-social but works on timid 15 and 16 year olds.
Out of school activities often are much more inclusive, including scouting,church groups, etc. Venturing is a good program for girls with interest in outdoor activities and learning leadership skills.
Broad longitudinal studies really don’t tell you anything about your particular snowflake (and I mean this in a positive way), so ignore Malcolm.
@TheGFG “The AP and honors teachers now routinely prohibit what they call “collusion,” since they have been made aware of the form of copying that the top students do…OK, you do 1-15 and I’ll do 16-30 and then we’ll swap files. This …entails minimal cheating oneself out of learning, since the kids are mostly just sharing the grunt work of looking it up and copying down the facts.”
Exactly. Rather than accepting that this “collusion” is “cheating”, I think the teacher should be asked–and held accountable–by the parents, what the kids are learning by doing all the gruntwork of looking up all the facts. If it’s “research skills” then I would still ask what is learned by doing 16-30 after already having done 1-15 and why it is that this cannot be done as a group in a more time-efficient way. Are they really being graded on how well they can google the info and whether they had time to google it all or are they being graded on whether they have learned the info well enough to answer questions where this knowledge is needed on the exam? In cases of factual info, I think teachers are already way too intrusive in how a kid masters it. This kind of super-repetitive make-work lookup the answer on the web is exactly the sort of thing that goes on in non-honors classes, making them unrewarding and unnecessarily time consuming for top students.
My daughter said the cheating she observed at school were two cases of kids bringing in answers they should have memorized into an exam (this was in low level language class, not honors/AP), kids lying in order to get extensions on work, kids copying homework from one another or from the web, and kids telling kids from a different section of the same course about exam questions. This last was mostly stopped by the teacher telling students that they were being curved against section2, and if they released the exam to the other class, their grades would suffer. Copying from the web is discouraged, but not completely stopped, by requiring assignments to be hand written. Yes, there is cheating, there will always be some cheating, but I don’t think it’s organized or rampant at our school. I think the vast majority of the cheating is on homework, which doesn’t count for much in the grades. I haven’t heard of students cheating on important exams.
At our high school, among the kids who will be applying to elite schools or state school honors college programs, the numbers taking summer enrichment classes of one sort or another have increased dramatically.
Among the kids taking AP physics, the usual CR+M SAT is probably above 1500, and students with lower SAT’s regard themselves as “overachievers.” At least this was the case several years ago when my kids went through.
And I am pretty sure our high school is not among the “top 200” either, yet most years sends students to each of HYPSM, et al.
One of my kids -also a three season athlete - was actually bored by the pace of AP instruction, nonetheless got to sleep by 9:30 each night and smiled and nodded when peers complained of late nights spent studying, and nowadays would probably have accelerated in math and supplemented classwork with MOOC’s.
"The district was having to pay for too many kids to take math classes at the local university " “Having”? Lucky you. Somehow our school district didn’t feel it “had” to pay for my kid to take math classes at the local university. Why would they?
This is why I don’t thin AP is "just like college ". In college they don’t care if you all do your home work together, if you do problems 1to 30 or just the odds or just the prime number. It is not just like college if the teachers are doing homework checks and binder checks and requiring maps colored with colored pencils.
Why do all this for the check that says you have taken the hardest classes available? Take AP classes because they are the classes you want to take. It sounds like OPs daughter is doing that. The risk is she might get a B. It’s a risk I’d take, but it is up to each student to decide.
Getting one into HYPS each every year means your school is really exceptional for admits, including the overachievers doing all this additional work (S is achievable since we on the EC, others, no, not sure anyone from county got accepted). So regardless of USNWR (google USNWR your school to find ranking or look at state list) … your school is very highly rated by HYPS, considering they each only have 1000-2000 spots and are giving one to your HS.
People of means have been sending their high achieving kids to very expensive summer schools since the early 80s in hopes of being vals and getting into HYP. The CCs and MOOCs are new.
I don’t think the district here ever pays, but they do provide school board PhDs to supervise Saturday self=study at over 2 years advanced math level (plus possibly other things). We do not have a magnet school, so DiffEQ is on-line self-study, etc. Summer school, not so much, and apparently is not good college prep for math or physics. We do have GT teachers in elementary schools for math and supplemental courses.
Given all these comments, I guess the arms race is part of why an ordinary very smart kid just isn’t going to get into HYP. Either you need stellar ECs, or recruited athlete, or legacy, or you need to go to summer enrichment (just recalled someone did that and got into S here).
I think it is important to realize that the workload for a given AP course varies a great deal from high school to high school. The workload required in order for the majority of the students to do very well on the AP exams is not as heavy as the imposed workload in some high schools. So, for a poster to write that “some kids” are able to handle the workload of #n of AP classes very well really just means that in the high school(s) the poster knows, it is possible; not that it is possible anywhere. And as pointed out by another poster, many of the people who are observing how well the students are handling the workload are not around when the students are doing homework at 1 am.
My quick test for how reasonable/unreasonable the workload is: How many high school students are falling asleep in class? Ideally, none; but if it is commonplace, there is probably a problem.
I would argue the question is only “is my child falling asleep in class or at the dinner table”? are they at an acceptable level of stress? do they have time to do unique things that will contribute to a good essay? do they have enough time to have friends (even if they are at the library all day Saturday, that does count).
These super schools and the 5 on the AP test DO help with school admissions. If 4 people are getting into HYPS every year from your high school, well those 4 spots are going to require a lot of extra work … but there is a path if you chose to take it. I assume the next 50+ are getting into flagships or top 80 schools, again far exceeding national norms.
HYP is becoming near mythology at many very good high schools.
I think the idea that there are HS that are not rigorous where your child can get a HYPS admit is likely a myth. And, if there is no competition in your HS, your child will have a very unpleasant surprise in any top 40 school when everyone else is tanned, rested and ready.
“there is also a pervasive arms race going on… I do not think the students are getting any smarter, just more savvy to how the game is being played.”
There have always been students who could accelerate a lot in math (ignoring those who are being pushed into summer school and weekend classes, which is a bit different), but most schools were not at all willing to accommodate them–it was easier to force these students to take classes several years below their level.
The high school I graduated from sent many to stanford and the Ives every year, and still does. I was in a class of 1000 and classes are still 800 plus. I think the school offers more than 20 AP classes. Some do go as athletes, but their grades are high. It is a suburban school Ina wealthy area. Lots of tutoring and act preps, many NMF.
The school my children attended had only a few who wanted to go out of state. In their class of 425, one to MIT AND one to Navy, both female.