Of course, some colleges require a 4 or 5 for at least some AP tests for subject credit or advanced placement, perhaps due to content mismatch or their courses being more rigorous, or finding that students with 3 who take advanced placement tend to do poorly in the following course.
Some AP tests are not all that well accepted due to lack of content match or rigor from the point of view of many colleges.
Hmmmm. I seem to remember that the $100 a month was spent this way: about once a week, out to eat with friends at a restaurant that was probably the equivalent of a Houlihan’s or Ruby Tuesday, ordering a not expensive item and no beverage - less than $10/time, so that’s $40. Maybe a pint of convenience store ice cream once a week, at I guess $2.50 per shot? So that’s another $10. We’re up to $50/month on “fun” stuff. So maybe $450 of the $900 for the year spent on fun stuff. Way back then, we had to actually buy textbooks - it was really hard to find used ones, other than at the bookstore’s jacked up 75% value (but you could sell them back for 50%, I think), so maybe $250/semester on textbooks, so that’s about $500 on books for the semester. Up to $950 (I guess I didn’t go out to eat once a week, maybe it was every other week). I do recall buying an inexpensive skirt/sweater set once that year for about $20, for an event. Oh, and taking the cheapest way home (walk half mile to 30th st station, take SEPTA to Trenton, and NJ Transit to Penn Station instead of expensive Amtrak and subway and city bus to Queens, then walk a half mile home), for Thanksgiving and maybe once in spring semester would have probably been a total of $30 round trip each time.
So no, I don’t think that $100/month to cover textbooks and incidentals was a lot of money - although to me, it felt like a very generous amount. Certainly, I was not spending it in the bars, like most of my classmates who were going out and getting drunk every Friday and Saturday night, nor was I spending it eating and drinking in the ‘fancy’ restaurants like some of the wealthy kids were.
But that wasn’t my point. My point was that my parents viewed my going to college as MY experience, not theirs. They got me there, and paid my tuition, and gave me an appropriate amount of spending money. And then they quickly LEFT, which was exactly what I wanted them to do. Seemed that everyone around me had pretty much the same experience. The event to be celebrated by the family was graduation, not matriculation. Being dropped off at college was exactly that - being dropped off. But of course, every family can and should do it exactly how it pleases them. I just have a feeling that if they think back to what they had wanted on move-in day, they would remember that the gist of the day was what happened AFTER the family left!
What struck me as truly absurd was the notion that the parents should write letters to the kid’s advisor to begin the process of the advisor getting to know the student. Appropriate for new 9th grade boarding school students, sure. Appropriate for college freshmen? No way.
My experience was from early '80’s so back in the day. Were there such things as AP Econ or Psych in those days? If so my HS didn’t offer. Same with lang and comp - not offered. The only AP that 11th graders took was APUSH. Also, AP was like “the serious track” for school LOL. I guess that’s still the case today, but back then a much smaller percentage took those courses.
Pint of Haagen Dazs ice cream in 1978 was $0.89.
Dinner out (main course, salad, dessert) cost around $7 (with tax and tip)!
Movie ticket was $2.34
$100 a month was a lot of money in 1978. Memory is a funny thing, thankfully we don’t have to rely on it when it comes to prices of the past.
Fancy that!
Not at a convenience store, it sure wasn’t! And no supermarkets near campus. But I just took a look at the allowance nowadays for books, transportation, personal expenses at the college I attended. It is now estimated to be $4300/year. The rate of inflation from 1978 through today is 419%. So $900 in 1978 would be, today, about $3771, or about 87% of the college’s estimates of a student’s expenses.
So no, I was most definitely NOT rolling in spending money. And as it was, after that freshman year, I worked part time while attending school full-time, and never asked for spending money again. Not that any of that is relevant to the point I was making - that flying out or road-tripping the entire family in a two vehicle caravan in order to make dropping off a kid at college into a several day or week long family celebration of a child’s matriculation seems odd to me, since what the child wants is to get away and start college! And the school’s inviting letters of introduction from the parents, in order to lay the groundwork for the advisor’s relationship with the student, seems beyond odd, and totally inappropriate for a young adult who is beginning college.
I went to a prep school in the 80s and took way less AP courses than my son. Also, they were all senior level. He took two of them as a sophomore. I am sure you’re also correct that some of them are new. There are the old standards like Calculus AB or BC. Anyone know how they came up with those terms?
I am sure there have been major generational changes. Your experience sounds very similar to mine. The two vehicle caravan is probably an extreme case.
You just jogged my memory a little. I went to a public university known for its football team, and if parents were alumni, there was a good chance they’d come for football games. I imagine that could be embarrassing for some students who were going to tailgate parties with friends. So I can picture instances where the parents might be on campus with their kids a few weekends in a semester and unless they’re avoiding each other, might take them out for lunch. I doubt that they would make a special trip just for that, nor would they hover around at orientation time. I mean, the whole point of that is for the students to feel comfortable on their own in the new environment.
Not when I was in high school. AP courses that I saw offered in the high school I attended were calculus BC, English literature, three foreign languages (the level 4 courses), and two others. No economics, psychology, statistics, environmental science, human geography.
Dropping off my S21 at school is also turning into our anniversary celebration because we can’t afford to do both. We are staying an extra day in the surrounding area to watch a ball game and go out to dinner. Maybe a two car caravan is the family summer vacation because otherwise there would be none.
I could be thinking about this wrong, but 1978 was the “stagflation era” (remember the 20% prime rate and Whip Inflation Now etc). Just looked it up: 7.59%! Any calculations involving a back-dating of “normalized” inflation rates is going to under-price a lot of consumer goods from that time period.
The amount of armchair psychologizing going on in this thread based on a certainly nonrepresentative sample built of anecdotes is…intriguing. I mean, not necessarily surprising, but still, intriguing.
So, to provide further anecdotes: My oldest two go to very different colleges—the oldest goes to a selective LAC, and the next goes to a state flagship in a location that gets little to no love on CC.
At the selective LAC, it’s generally assumed that parents will help with move-in and move-out, but otherwise parents are kept at arms length, if not further—there’s a staff member from the provost’s office who has been tasked with keeping tabs on the parents Facebook group, but their responses are mainly just limited to answering questions by pointing to where to find answers on the college website (which is, frankly, not easy to use). And that makes sense! The students and families at this college have a lot of academic cultural capital, and so there isn’t a lot of need for parents to be pulled into the day-to-day lives of their students—the students can pretty much take care of themselves.
At the big public university, parents are pulled in as much as possible. To give an example of how strong this is, orientation is explicitly billed as a whole-family event (including special tours for younger siblings!), with seminars for the parents on how to be very involved in their children’s learning. The university goes so far as to have a dashboard where (if the student gives permission, and they are urged to do so) parents can look up grade progress throughout the semester (if faculty upload it, and they are urged to do so, especially for gen-ed courses) and a running total of absences, and they ask parents to intervene if there are warning signs of their kid not making satisfactory progress. And that makes sense! This is a university that serves a very wide range of students, but particularly including a very large proportion who are the first in their families to attend college (or just the second after a sibling), and a quite sizable number who come from high-poverty areas of their high-poverty state—the level of academic cultural capital among the student body and their families isn’t necessarily very high at all.
Huh. Maybe one size doesn’t fit all, even when looking at things from an institutional perspective—so imagine how much less so one size fits all when looking at things in terms of individual families and their needs.
My guess is that AB covered Calc I and part of Calc II at the time, while BC covered the remainder of Calc II and then Calc III?
It seems unlikely that BC ever covered calculus 3 (multivariable calculus), unless you are referring to calculus 3 at a quarter system school where it is the last third of single variable calculus.
I always figured it meant “If you expect to get an A or a B in the first one, you’ll probably get a B or C in the other.” 
While your explanation makes sense, I still think it’s a very curious naming convention.
A lot of people here seem to assume that independence on the part of a student necessarily equates a sort of emotional detachment. Doesn’t always have to be so. I think My D Is pretty mature in a lot of ways. Hasn’t had a parent supervise the completion or quality of her homework since mid-elementary school (though we’ve sometimes tutored, advised, when she asked for help) and has been a fine, self-motivating student. But she’s also very sentimental, loves family, home and hearth, and gets a little teary at the idea of leaving home even though she’s also excited for college. She has good social instincts (though a bit shy) and is a conscientious worker. We know she’ll do well. I won’t intervene in her college life. But she’s going to want that move-in support, warmth and celebratory cheer from her parents on move-in day. There will probably be some healthy happy/sad tears all around. If we’re allowed enough time in the room, I think she’ll want my involvement in cozying-up her room with her as the last “mama thing” that I do. I DO hope she’ll be ready to push me out the dorm and bounce away with some other students by the end of move-in, but I don’t think it means that she’s immature or that I’ve over-babied her if we have a warm and emotional send-off. Some of us are just temperamentally made this way. I’m saying this as a person who spent six years of my life in two extended tours of Peace Corps (Pre-computer/iPhone) at a time wheN there was only (erratic) snail-mail and I’d say goodbye to family for two years at a stretch. I think I know what independence is, and it doesn’t necessarily have to mean being detached. I’m not ashamed that my D and I are close, and will reflect that on move-in day. Her school does send parents away from students and starts an Intensive, three-day orientation right after move-in so students begin bonding as a class. That is good.
There’s clearly not one right way and it depends on the student, the parent, and their relationship. Your daughter sounds wonderful, and honestly there’s nothing new about having a strong commitment to your family. If anything, that’s very old-fashioned.
For my son, I do think it’ll be great for him to be away. He respects us and behaves responsibly, but as a teenager, he doesn’t want to socialize with me and listen to dad jokes* and math puzzles. He really doesn’t want me to tell him what to do either, though he’s perfectly happy to do what his teacher or employer requires. I think he’s eager to be on his own. I felt the same way, again, with no hard feelings toward my family. I just wanted to have more autonomy.
I am really hoping this will be a great experience. I admit I hope he’ll miss me a little more, when I’m far away physically. I do want to know he’s safe and I hope he’ll stay in touch by email. Just a “Yes I’m still alive.” is fine, doesn’t have to be weekly report or anything.
*To be clear, it’s probably my fault. When he was in middle school and liked the CHERUB series (Robert Muchamore) I would comment that “There’s muchamore than meets the eye to those books.” or “Do you like that one muchamore than the first book in the series?” I may have burnt him out on both me and that author.
yeah - I’m wondering if the AB/BC thing is based on a college quarter system. Quarters were a lot more common back in the day. A 5 on the BC will give you automatic placement into Calc 152 (2nd quarter of the regular series) at UChicago. At Stanford (also on quarters), you seem to place out of Math 19-21 which is the single-variable sequence. Both schools also require the math placement exam or diagnostic. Can’t remember what you placed out of at Cal Berkeley back then when they were on quarters - @ucbalumnus you might recall?
Actually, I think they have a large percentage who get 5’s on the BC! 5’s and 4’s together well over 50%. But that might just be a self-selection thing. Kids who are completely lost probably don’t take the exam and probably drop the class.
It almost certainly is a self-selection thing. Calculus BC is typically chosen by the strongest-in-math students in high school; those merely good at math (and one year advanced) are more likely to choose calculus AB (which has a lower score distribution, even though it covers less material and should therefore be “easier”).
This is likely the same reason why, among the SAT subject tests that are being discontinued, math level 2 has a higher score distribution than math level 1.