<p>^^LOL.</p>
<p>Back in the day, Cincinnati was a LONG way from Va. because I-64 hadn’t been built through WVa. I remember scary winding roads, long hills, and big trucks. :eek:</p>
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<p>Ah, the advantages of a progressive all-girls’ school. There was no Home Ec or typing, and we all took Shop. I’m still better with tools than H (although that’s not saying much.) But I could have used the typing and cooking lessons!</p>
<p>I graduated from a well-regarded single sex high school in New Jersey in 1973. I was in the top 10% of my class and I don’t think I broke 1200 (on the old SATs). I was considered one of the more ambitious ones because I took 2 Achievement Tests. There were no AP classes, only Honors classes, which I found quite challenging. The only in-school ECs were glee club and sports (field hockey, basketball, or tennis). I didn’t participate in any of that.</p>
<p>Most of us ended up at top notch colleges. We greatly benefited from the fact that the Ivies and top liberal arts colleges were just starting to accept women and they were eager to snap up hard-working, motivated sisters and daughters.</p>
<p>I didn’t mean that boys & girls HAD to take those courses, just that you couldn’t go against the grain and take the “wrong” one.</p>
<p>I couldn’t fit typing in so I took it in summer school one year. I’m glad I did!</p>
<p>DH was accepted to Dartmouth with “stats” lower than DS’s. There is NO WAY DS would have been accepted to D’mouth…NONE.</p>
<p>Coureur…I also graduated in '69! Back in the day…the way you found out about colleges was you went to the GC’s office and looked at a huge bookshelf of catalogs. Most students didn’t visit schools at all…they didn’t see their schools until they went there to attend.</p>
<p>There WAS no US News ranking back in the day. And you know what, I don’t think it mattered.</p>
<p>No one (and I mean no one) really “prepped” for the SAT or the ACT. And the PSAT was called the NMSQT because really, that’s all it was used for then.</p>
<p>An “expensive school” was $5000 a year.</p>
<p>I graduated in 1969, and my HS offered no APs or weighted grades. This was in a small town in Oregon.</p>
<p>The other big difference I can see between then and now is the rise of the National University - schools like all of the USNews top 20 or 30 schools that kids from all over the country dream of attending. We had heard of Harvard and Yale, but those places didn’t really exist for us, even for our valedictorians. Harvard might as well have been located on Mars. Today kids nearly everywhere dream much bigger.</p>
<p>Most of our college-bound kids went to either Oregon or Oregon State plus a smattering of smaller in-state schools. A few kids went out of state but almost never farther away than Idaho, Washington, or California. Every five years or so years one of the boys would get into West Point or the Air Force Academy. One girl in my class who was the class hippie went off to Macalester - a school none of us had ever heard of.</p>
<p>I’m from DC, my high school was in Virginia. Like limabeam, community service was part of the program. I don’t remember it being mentioned in my applications either. </p>
<p>We took SATs twice, even the girl who got 750/750 the first time. (She grumbled mightily, and got 790/710 the second time.) As you can see we DID talk about our scores, though never about grades that I can recall. No SAT study courses, but I do remember vocab practice being a small part of English classes, including at least some time with those analogies.</p>
<p>I applied to three schools - Harvard, Brown and Penn. I visited Harvard, Tufts and Barnard.</p>
<p>I’ve always been a lousy typer, my boyfriend typed half my college thesis and a roommate the other half. My aunt told me to learn how to type, but never to admit I could in a job interview.</p>
<p>I took a cheese bus to school and frequently did my homework on the bus.</p>
<p>I tend to agree with coureur. At about the same time at our IL HS no one had much heard of any private college with exception of Harvard, because John Kennedy had attended. I remembering one kid mentioning Northwestern and all I knew about it was it was in the Big Ten. I decided to take the ACT when I heard a girl I liked was taking was taking it on that day (turned out to be a good decision, though not from a college admissions perspective ;)). A score of 27 got one mentioned at a school assembly, a 24 ensured admission to the “Big U”, Univ. of IL. Kids with GPAs of 1.9 were in the upper 50% of the graduating class. No one every used the term EC. I was captain of our academic decathlon team that finished 2nd in the state and never thought to mention it (would have been first if I hadn’t inadvertently given the answer to the other team, still bugs me). Mostly we laughed had fun, went to dances every weekend, cut class, raided parents’ liquor cabinets, and encouraged the girls to wear ever shorter skirts. No regrets whatsoever.</p>
<p>Minnesota</p>
<p>I forgot to mention that back in '76 in my blue collar high school there was only ONE kid with a calculator. In order to afford it, his mother gave ballet lessons out of their house. Now he is one of those ambulance chasing attorneys. I never did like that kid…back in grade school we had races around the room with the big erasers on our head…he had a crew cut and always won.</p>
<p>Correction for post #46–the PSAT was a different test from the NMSQT, at least in 1967; only juniors took the PSAT and it really did predict my SAT score (which I only took once)–add 50 pts and then add a 0. The NMSQT was taken in the spring of junior year and I remember it being very difficult. My school didn’t rank and we didn’t have AP’s, just accelerated and Honors, but there wasn’t any weighting. I didn’t take calculus because I would have had to go to the local JC, which wasn’t going to happen with me being the oldest of 4 kids (transportation would have been extremely difficult). There were 11 of us in a class of 800 with 4.0–1 went to Harvard (SB president and Black), 1 to Yale, and 5 of us to Stanford; most of the smart kids went to UCLA. Our school was in the central area of a large inner suburban area, so there were an awful lot of kids who didn’t go on to college. All of us who wanted to go to good schools knew we needed to have a variety of outside activities, but we certainly didn’t have what the top kids do today.</p>
<p>I graduated from a private school in the Bronx, in New York City, in 1972. (Nobody ever called the NYC private day schools prep schools.) Almost two hours round trip every day by bus and subway from where I lived in Manhattan, plus school didn’t even end until 4 pm every day.</p>
<p>The school was single-sex then and had been for about 50 years; it became co-ed again a couple of years after I graduated. (Until then, Renee Richards and I were the first female graduates since the 1920’s! At least, after the fact. My “cover” was that I fit in reasonably well among dozens of short little Jewish boys with glasses, and kept my mouth shut about how I felt.)</p>
<p>There were 106 kids in my graduating class. 85% Jewish, approximately. Everyone went to college except one boy I knew, and I think he was the first kid from the school not to go to college in many years. (I saw him at a reunion decades later; he ended up going to college after about a 10 year interval, and went on to get a Ph.D.)</p>
<p>The scores and other qualifications of the top students were very similar to those I see described on CC now. Out of our class of 106, 25 ended up going to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. (I went to Yale. Again following in Renee Richards’s footsteps!) And a total of more than 50, almost exactly half the class, went to the Ivy League. Plus a couple to MIT, and at least one each to Stanford, Amherst, etc. (I happened to check recently, and the school’s admissions results aren’t quite that spectacular anymore. But not that far away.) We thought of ourselves as among the best high schools in New York, the equal of Bronx Science or Stuyvesant or Dalton, or places like Hunter or Brearley among the all-girls’ schools (public or private), and better than the two other private schools up in Riverdale (a section of the Bronx). Whether that was all true or not, I can’t really tell you. (I’m sure there are some among you who could easily guess what school it was.)</p>
<p>There was no class rank; it had been eliminated some years earlier. I never heard of weighting until my son was in high school. The school had its own “Cum Laude Society,” though, for which you had to be in the top 20% of the class. I was selected, but was never told exactly where I stood. Certainly not anywhere near the top – my math and science grades weren’t good enough.</p>
<p>I was one of about 10 National Merit Finalists in the class. Most people, including me, took the SAT’s twice, although nobody I knew of took a prep class; you bought a book with practice tests in it. The Kaplan prep classes already existed, but were thought of as being for “dumb kids.” There were a number of kids who got 800’s on their math SAT’s; none on the verbal that I can remember. I took them twice (as did most people), and got a 1480 the first time, 1460 the second. There were at least a dozen kids, or more, with higher scores than mine.</p>
<p>I took four Achievement tests (= the SAT subject tests or SAT II’s; I’ve already forgotten what they call them now), and don’t remember my exact scores, except that they were all 750+. At least one 800, I know.</p>
<p>The school offered many AP classes; I took 4 (US and Modern European History; English Literature; French Language), and got 3 5’s, with a 4 in French. Most of the other good students took more (in math and science).</p>
<p>I had only one major extracurricular activity; I was one of four kids comprising our Debate team. We reached the quarterfinals (maybe it was the semis, but I don’t think so) of the New York State championships my senior year. I still have my few individual trophies (probably broken by now) somewhere. There were many other extracurricular activities (including sports, although “jocks” weren’t exactly revered at my school.)</p>
<p>I did participate in a national French test sponsored by the National Association of Teachers of French (I think), and know I finished third. Whether it was in New York or the country I don’t even remember. Now, I hardly remember a word!</p>
<p>I knew that there were some kids who smoked pot (it was the late 60’s and early '70’s), but I never actually saw anyone do it until I got to college.</p>
<p>I applied to only 6 schools – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Penn. I interviewed at Swarthmore and also started the application process at Chicago (where my older sister was), but decided not to go forward with either. Columbia and Penn were my safety schools. (Times have changed!) I considered Columbia a safety, in part, because both my parents had gone to law school there. Princeton was my first choice, and I was one of the 8 or so kids told by our guidance counselor shortly in advance that we were likely to be admitted, from what he had heard, but I only made the waiting list, and was actually rather heartbroken. I got into Yale, obviously, and to Penn and Columbia, but was rejected at Harvard (as I expected; I knew I had no chance) and at Brown, which was very popular, then as now, because of the absence of any distribution requirements.</p>
<p>Today, with my scores and grades (the former about the same as my son’s, and the latter not quite as good) and just one EC, I doubt I would have gotten into any of them, although perhaps I would have had a chance at Columbia and Penn. </p>
<p>In any event, I think the college admissions process and general academic experience at my school were about as close as one got back then to what goes on today, much more commonly. And were extremely competitive, too.</p>
<p>^I know where you went to school, but had no idea it was 85% Jewish.</p>
<p>DH went to Bronx Science, late 70s. Got into Penn with Ben Franklin scholarship (at the time, full tuition) with a 740V/760M, 90 average (admitted slacker), debate/extemp, math team, co-editor of math journal and went to NSF at UGA for a summer (coincidentally, the same time I was there for a yearbook camp). 800s in Math Level II, Chem, Physics, took AP Physics C, BC Calc and Chem. His teachers were openly disappointed he didn’t do Westinghouse, as there was an “expectation” that top students at Bx Sci do so. Said there wasn’t much so much competition among the students as there was living up to being worthy of Bx Sci and the teachers.</p>
<p>Also applied to Albany (accepted), Northwestern (accepted) and Harvard (rejected).</p>
<p>Yes, Mathmom, it had always been a place for smart Jewish kids to go (besides the selective public high schools), back to the turn of the 20th century. I think the percentage was that high from maybe the 30’s through the 70’s; I’m sure it isn’t anymore.</p>
<p>One thing I forgot to mention was that my verbal SAT, re-centered, would have been 800 both times. As I pointed out to my son when he tried to lord it over me with his two 800’s! I was always quite awful at math, especially compared to a lot of my classmates. I managed to get a 740 one of the times I took the math SAT, and a 710 the other, essentially by counting on my fingers. Seriously.</p>
<p>The one thing we didn’t have that Bronx Science and Stuyvesant did was kids competing in the Westinghouse competition. At least, that I can remember.</p>
<p>PS: Amazing that everyone seems to remember so many of their scores, 35+ years after the fact!</p>
<p>Donna, I remember my ACT composite was 29 which was considered very high in 1974. A classmate went to Cornell with the same score.</p>
<p>I graduated 3rd in my class of about 250, with 790/740 SATs. This was a public high school in rural NJ in 1975. As others have said, no weighting, minimal ECs, and only one AP course (biology). A lot of kids took AP tests (I took the English one), but we were expected to prepare for them on our own just like the SATs.</p>
<p>I applied to Williams, Hamilton, Macalester, and Rutgers, and got into all of them. I had my heart set on Williams, but wound up at Hamilton because they offered about twice as much FA. One thing that sticks in my mind is that my guidance counselor tried to steer me away from Hamilton and Williams. She said something to the effect that kids from our HS didn’t get into schools like that, and she suggested Gettysburg (which was less competitive then than now) as a reach school. Our valedictorian went to Rutgers, and the #2 and #4 kids both went to Moravian. I think the guidance department must have been practicing something akin to yield protection (“our students have been accepted at over 90% of the colleges they’ve applied to!”).</p>
<p>Oh another thing…Girls didn’t do sports very much. This was before Title IX and there weren’t too many girl’s sports.</p>
<p>I played tennis…on the boys team LOL. I had to wait on the bus after the matches while the boys got to go to a locker room and shower and change. Funny to think about that today. Title 9 passed shortly after I graduated and by the time by sib was in HS several years later there was a girls tennis team. I wish I could find how the ACT was scored in the early-mid 70s, I can’t remember if it still went to 36 or not. Anybody know?</p>
<p>I graduated in the late sixties. I was a national merit semi-finalist and my SAT’s and Achievement Test scores were all in the mid-700’s, after one sitting and without even looking at a practice book, let alone taking a class. I do not remember my exact scores anymore, a sign I am getting older, I suppose. I was also a "straight A "student, but took few AP courses. (Nobody took more than a few - we could take “Honors” instead.)</p>
<p>My parents regarded the high scores as a “problem” for me and instructed me to lie about my scores to boyfriends, making them in the high 500’s or low 600’s. OTOH, they had no issue with being boastful about my brothers’ achievements. </p>
<p>I was not permitted to apply to many of the well-known schools attractive to today’s over-achievers, because children of my parents’ friends had gone to those schools and gotten involved with left-wing politics. (Swarthmore was especially “scary.”) As a 15yo, I wasn’t quite ready to apply anyway…I suppose the counter-culture of the late sixties was frightening to middle-class parents.</p>