Frustrated re amount of homework - quit fabulous classes to keep kid's (and my sanity???)

Parents Forum
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I can see how the sibling trick could have worked in the past, and especially at a different testing center. Now, however, current school ID’s are also required so it would be harder.

What confuses me about this discussion is that to a large extent a student’s performance is relative. Adcoms judge applicants in context, and further many kids from the same high school apply to the same colleges. Taking the same course load and earning the same grades, a student can be valedictorian in one school, whereas in another he’d only be #50. But if he’s in the second school and now he decides to scale back on advanced classes such that he drops to a rank of 100, I can’t see how he isn’t going to seriously restrict his college options. And no, I don’t mean he has that now he has to settle for CMU instead of Harvard. He wouldn’t be getting into even CMU with a rank of #50, so that’s not the issue.

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Of course performance is relative. Also, demand for both elite school education and merit money/honors college perks at “lesser” schools seems to be outstripping supply of places for reasons beyond the control of parents and colleges.

What we saw when our kids were applying to colleges was that once our school no longer reported class rank (and colleges did not have to factor this into their stats) there was no longer an incentive for elite schools to deny students not in the top 10% and more students got into these schools.

Once out of the range of elite schools, though, some colleges were comparing GPA’s from schools that presented a lower level of rigor and competition even in AP classes.

I also have to wonder if the ceiling on these tests is too low for elite schools to distinguish applicants from each other solely on the basis of test scores, or even for high schools to highlight the number of truly outstanding students in the competitive pool? Applicants are then driven to add AP’s, and also to score in competitions on the state and national level.

Here again, some schools do a better job of preparing students for these competitions than others and families can also turn to private tutoring. One of my kids was stunned, after advancing in one of these competitions without a history of private tutoring or enrichment activities, to discover the level of coaching that every other student had experienced on top of any “natural ability.”

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Have not read all responses…

But if your kid is a sophomore, then is AP Bio a reach? Why not Honors bio? and take an AP science senior year? She is effectively taking a college course…of course that is a lot of work.

Also my daughter took AP Bio, AP Calc, AP Psychology senior year but took Honors English and Cooking and choir as well. She ended up at The College of New Jersey. So she pick and chose where to spend her “AP” energy.

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@TiggyB62 the proctors are not looking at the ID’s that closely. And, at least in our area, there are some issues with cross-racial identification. Specifically, you have an old white guy looking at a thousand ID pictures of indian and asian kids early on a saturday morning, and he’s not being paid enough to be an expert in facial identification and he left his reading glasses in the pickup truck.

In our younger kid’s case, I have a blue eyed blonde who currently has big nerd glasses, braces and dark blue hair. In her SAT ident pic she looks like someone from the children of the corn, but what she looks like in person is totally different. Waved right in, never batted an eye.

In older DD’s case, they never looked at her school id and barely glanced at the sat form, and that’s a caucasian to caucasian identification. I’m not trying to start a huge fire here, but if you don’t think there is some cheating going on with the SAT’s, you’d be mistaken. It has been our experience that they are not working super-hard to correlate the kid to the SAT form.

Again, our attitude is at some point this is unsustainable behavior (you can’t get your big brother to take your chem tests for you at Caltech or CMU), and that water finds its own level.

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High schools are free to offer AP classes in any time frame they see fit so long as they follow the AP curriculum. Some schools do split APUSH into two years. I have also seen examples of schools splitting Physics C, Econ, Studio Art (really?!? 2 years to put together ~24 slides?!?) and Calc BC into two years. As for APUSH having an inordinate amount of material, I disagree. I found it no more difficult that AP European History, but like all AP classes, the teachers can make or break the class. While the College Board dictates the curriculum, it is the school/teacher that determines the amount of homework/busywork involved in the class.

This, IMO, was a brain fart on the CB’s part. As a result of eliminating Physics B, many schools eliminated honors physics and now have AP Physics 1 as an intro physics course. With twice as many students taking the AP Physics 1 exam compared to the previous year’s AP Physics B exam, and with a 63% failure rate on the AP exam, it’s pretty obvious that schools were putting kids into an AP course, possibly with parental/student pressure, that had no business taking an AP science course yet. Also, a common misconception is that the College Board “split” the Physics B course. While 2 new courses were created, the curriculum was designed so that the new curriculum was more conceptual with less “plug and chug” math, although based upon performance, I don’t think all teachers got the message. There’s lots of blame to go around on this decision/implementation.

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To the OP - I think it’s really important for your daughter to figure some of this out on her own. Sometimes the struggle itself is important. She might struggle to get an A yet feel very satisfied with what she accomplished. She might struggle and get a B, and say that wasn’t worth it. Each is a data point for her.

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@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. They typically meet together after school in the public library and divide up the homework. Let’s say the assignment is to look up brief biographical data on 30 leaders of the American Revolution. OK, you do 1-15 and I’ll do 16-30 and then we’ll swap files. This sort of collusion carries very little risk of being caught and 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.”

If they are still able to get 5s on the AP exam with less grunt work, then I am not sure why this is bad. Perhaps teachers should just provide what they want the students to know and them test them on it to reduce the look it up time, or encourage all students to collaborate. Most students are not learning much by googling anyway, or from paraphrasing the AP test prep book that they bought.

Reducing time wasting homework is one thing. If they cheat on a test, that is entirely different to me.

MIT virtually required that sort of collaboration to get through because the p-sets are so extensive and difficult. Perhaps not copying, but working together on the problems, with weaker students copying the answers from stronger ones, and hopefully learning how to do it. (Relatively weaker by the MIT definition of weaker, lol).

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@MotherOfDragons I’m not saying that there isn’t cheating going on, but hopefully it’s more difficult today. Maybe someday they will go to fingerprint ID or something like that.

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I agree @Much2Learn. My son’s AP Global teacher divided the class into teams, with the idea that they would share the workload. She is probably the best teacher in the district and all the kids got 5’s. Most considered it the best academic experience of high school. They liked being treated more like adults. And the amount of knowledge they gained was impressive - they used to hold session at my kitchen table. So - collusion isn’t always a bad thing. Some colleges, especially outside of the US, function this way. And my D’s comp sci class does, as well. One still has to be responsible to learn all the material for exams, but that’s up to individual.

I know in other courses, kids did copy homework. For some reason, it never bothered me that much. A single homework assignment counts very little, and it is still up to the student to know the material when it counts. I could just never loose sleep over a copied homework here and there. And yes, there were kids who routinely gamed the system, and it bothered my son sometimes. Maybe I am cynical. Adults game the system, too. I don’t lose sleep over them either.

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FWIW, in many courses at Harvard, the professor encourages students to work together on problem sets, although each student’s work is supposed to be his/her own. Any student who uses the opportunity as a way to get the HW done without actually doing the work, however, will soon pay the price come exam time. In the “real world,” people often have to work together as a team.

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Frazzled, I am glad you acknowledge that high school performance is relative. However, I have yet to hear anyone really delineate the college results one can expect after dialing back as is being recommended. I think the OP needs to assess her particular school situation before deciding to do that. For example, in our district, some students are bused from the middle school to the high school to take Physic BC and Calculus BC. So only taking regular Calculus as a junior may sound reasonable to some of you based on your school context, but that’s really quite low level for us. Therefore, in our context a kid who dials back on one area, let’s say in lab science, may need to add some rigor in another area in order to compensate, or else she risks falling too low in comparison to her peers to achieve good (not great) college results.

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I also don’t think that sort of collusion is bad, but if the teacher says he considers it academic dishonesty and prohibits it, would you advise your S or D to ignore the teacher and do it anyway because you don’t think it’s wrong? I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that, but sometimes I think our ethics work against us.

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I think the speed reading class I took at lunch in high school was one of the best things I did. Reading is a eye brain skill and even very good readers can improve their reading speed considerably with only a slight drop in comprehension (and many things, including literature, don’t need 100% comprehension). Obviously, slow reading or poor comprehension needs to be corrected as soon as possible.

My high school had a 10 book summer reading list, which I thought was great in that we only had to reread parts of the book for our on-class discussions and essays. And this class was way beyond the AP prep classes I see now (and I got a 5 on AP English).

CMU story is true at another top engineering school. I am sure the reading / writing expectations at a top 20 school for an A or even B would be very high in other majors. So not only do you need to push yourself to get into a top school, but also to do well there.

I would certainly try to stay with vigorous classes that insure good math and reading/writing preparation in high school.

Google makes a lot of the busywork go faster on research, and you can find approved sources (not wikipedia, but that usually makes for a good overview you can use to make sure you are covering the basics) that way and use them in your bibliography (a lot quicker than scanning the stacks and looking for references in a book). Efficient research including locating people who can help you, teachers, peers, tutors is another skill you should learn in high school.

Dialing back from 2 AP classes in sophomore year will not take you out of the running (pun intended) for a top school, it’s pretty aggressive.

Naviance and discussion with your guidance counsellor on typical outcomes for their top (is top 15 APs or 8?), top 10%, top 20% students for example in UC and CSU admissions would be very helpful. Now is a good time, before you need to commit to a junior year schedule.

I will say in junior year, no top student has free time or time for 10 hours of sleep. Everyone is pushing hard. Senior year, many students dial back because they feel the race is over.

XC at JV level is not exceptional … you don’t have to do any sport but would have to replace with a quality EC. I might actually recommend that, but you can’t do debate team and skip gym credit.

Number of AP tests taken is a metric used to rate schools. I believe it is tests, not courses, which is why my daughter was encouraged to take some low score tests and missed out on AP National Scholar. I don’t think our APs were exceptional or ridiculous amounts of work, but lots of 3s and 4s, not many 5s.

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I agree with @skieurope, @Much2learn and @VMT . I don’t see working as group for homework is a bad thing. If it’s a test situation , that’s entirely different.

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D’16’s band, varsity sport, ec’s and all honor/AP course load left almost no time to socialize/relax. Family time was driving to or from a practice/game/school. Now, as a senior, academic demands, while still high, are not so crucial and marching band season is entering its final weeks D’16 has finally had time to socialize with her non band peers. Actually got to attend homecoming and birthday parties and just “go to the mall”. My D’18 just reported to me that D’16 recently tweeted (I do not follow them on twitter) “I used to be a lot less social, I am so much happier now”. We suffered through some dark times mid sophomore through junior year.

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Motherofdragons: Do you personally know of kids doing this re SATs or is this speculation? It is hard to figure out how having a sibling take an SAT would automatically result in a higher score than a kid who has presumably been prepping and is closer in time to the math classes. Our kid had to upload a recent picture to the SAT registration. He took one SAT at a farther away high school because he was there that weekend for an EC. I find it hard to believe that is wide-spread.

And GFG are you saying 8th graders are taking BC calc? More than one per every few years? You must be in an incredibly competitive district.

As you say (and others have said), the OP needs to figure out what level and type of college her daughter is interested in and what it takes to get in there. There are many fine schools where the daughter could go that do not require many APs and where a B+ average will be just fine.

Even if the school does not rank, the school provides a profile report that shows the distribution of grades by both course (but not section) and by the overall class. That is, if a kid has a B in Physics 1 honors, the report may show that 5% of the kids taking that class got an A and 80% got a B, meaning B is pretty good. OTOH, if 50% got an A, then the B is less impressive. It does not, however, show that the classes taught by one teacher had mostly Bs and the other mostly Cs.

labegg - hope his hard work pays off with some great acceptances.

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The number of schools which provide a grade distribution by course on the school profile is infinitesimally small.

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No. Her class, her rules. I would express an alternate point of view, but ultimately, it’s the teacher’s/school’s decision. In terms of choosing battles to fight, I’d put this way down on the list.

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@TheGFG asked “but if the teacher says he considers it academic dishonesty and prohibits it, would you advise your S or D to ignore the teacher and do it anyway because you don’t think it’s wrong? I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that, but sometimes I think our ethics work against us.”

Of course I would not advise my children to ignore the teacher. That would be unethical. I don’t see anyone here stating they would violate the rules set up by the teacher. Let me clarify - I stated I don’t think collusion is bad - meaning, it can be an effective way of learning and sharing knowledge. Just like when kids form study groups. If teachers do not specifically say, “do not work together on homework”, I don’t have an issue with it.

My daughter’s friends got together many days during lunch right before AP-physics class to discuss the homework. I saw this as healthy. If my daughter had not attempted the homework, it would be a different story. But, I knew she worked very hard on it and the subject matter was difficult. She was great at circuits. Someone else was was great at pullies. They helped each other. Sounds good to me.

I am impressed that middle schoolers take AP Physics and Calc BC in your school district. Since high school performance is relative, no one here can delineate the impact of backing off on AP’s. Only your GC will have that data. The best any student in our district can do is take AP Calc-AB as a senior. There is no option to start the math sequence sooner. The flip side is, the kids at your school are very well-prepared and probably test out of many more college classes than my daughter could possibly test out of.

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@skieurope: did not know that. Our district provides that in the School Profile sent to colleges, which is also available on the website for the typical 11th grade courses. Not for every course ever taken and not for all electives. Is that not standard practice?