IMHO, the article itself has the explanation for the problem: For many of our students — those who have had to be almost perfect to get accepted into a school like Smith — failure can be an unfamiliar experience. Exactly! The kids have had to be perfect in K-12 to get to the college. They’ve been measured and sorted since kindergarten. They know it … and that puts tremendous pressure on them to be “perfect” during the turbulent teenage years. The expectations are extremely high even if not explicitly stated and there’s a well-defined track they need to follow. Some kids do fine in that environment – apparently many of the kids and kids of parents on CC. That’s great. If I was a teen now I’d hate it and rebel against it, if not in an in-your-face way.
Even back in the ancient days when I was in school there were problems. I hated school from 9th onwards, barely graduating from HS and eventually dropping/flunking out of EE in UT-Austin. The predefined track was not my bag but luckily I stumbled upon a profession (PC programming) where it didn’t matter – at the time, I’d never get hired by a company these days. It’s only gotten worse for kids now. I mentioned long ago in a post that when D18 was in the 9th grade we went through the HS class list and we came up with a schedule of classes she wanted to take during HS. We had things like Forensics, Photography, Languages, etc. A really nice assortment of topics. She took the schedule to her GC and the GC replied, you’ll never get into a good college with that level of rigor. Out went the classes interesting to her and in came a bunch of AP classes. And now, as a rising senior, she says she “should have taken another AP as a sophomore” because she’s just outside the top 10% and that’s what matters to top colleges. There’s that damn perfection issue rearing its ugly head again. And yet I see numerous rigor-measuring contests on CC, even here in the Parents forum.
I don’t have any good answers … but I don’t like it. Sorry for the rant.
The article is about “high-end” college students, but I’ve noticed an increased level of anxiety even among my “directional college” students. I think it’s more than just a pressure for the almost perfect to succeed. There is a lot of pressure coming from other directions as well.
I have been thinking about this a lot since my senior year of high school (I am a junior in college now). The pressure cookers that are elite colleges cannot be forced to disincentivize hard work. At the same time, mental health and wellbeing is a serious issue. There is a lot that can be done to increase awareness and resources for mental health. However, changing a culture is a much taller order - I do not have any good answers for that.
My daughter, already in therapy for anxiety, has persuaded several of her college friends to visit the school’s counseling center on a regular basis. She said she’s shocked at how many kids she knows are struggling. D was a B student in high school, but she’s making all As now. She said she feels less pressure in college and that’s why she thinks she’s doing better!
@MaineLonghorn – did your D ever explain the reason for the pressure and resulting anxiety in HS? I can’t get a clear answer from my D. I don’t believe we’re the main problem because D’s told us several times how her friends complain about their parents putting tons of pressure on them to excel while we “try to get her to do less difficult things”.
I also think that this is where “fit” comes in, to which parents may give too little credence. My d was a very smart humanities & social sciences kid who didn’t like and struggled with upper-level math & science in high school. She chose an excellent, albeit not Ivy-level, university with very few cross-subject requirements. She knew she’d be miserable at a school she’d have to struggle to get into. We were a bit concerned that she wouldn’t get a “well-rounded” education. We were wrong.
As a sophomore there, she wondered to me why college felt so much easier than high school. I replied, “Because you’re now playing to your strengths. You’re taking classes the interest you, so it’s not a problem to work hard at them; you enjoy that, and they pique your curiosity. And you’re not taking significant time away from them to study for classes that don’t interest you.” She did better in college than she ever did in high school.
If a kid goes to a school that doesn’t feel like “home”, that continues a pressure-cooker atmosphere, then there often are these kind of mental health and well-being issues.
@droppedit, there’s a lot of pressure at our high school for kids to do well. I don’t think it was us, either, because D was kid #3 and I never even looked at her grades online as so many other parents seem to do. Also playing into the situation, though, was the fact that her two big brothers had both been diagnosed with serious mental illness when she was 13 (yep, the same year for both of them). She tried to be the “normal kid” and put pressure on herself to look like she was doing well when she wasn’t. Her Girl Scout leader was the one who alerted me to the fact that she was putting on a brave front and really needed help. We had no clue!!
There’s a lot to be said for being the big fish in the smaller pond. My D did not do particularly well in hS. She isn’t competitive, forced me to take her out of the gifted program (I forced my parents to let me leave Bronx Science after 3 semesters, so I understood) and refused to take any AP or honors classes in HS. At college, she got into the honors program and graduated magna cum laude. She would have been summa but the cello classes she took and got B’s in pulled her gpa down.
I’m sorry but any high school that allows kids to get nothing but over 98s in its classes is not serving its students well.
Our competitive public high school is on a 4.0 scale with a 90 percent for an A. In AP science classes, an 80% is an A. We never have anyone graduate with a perfect unweighted 4.0. The classes are hard and the kids are very bright. In a class of 700, 150 of the kids get a 34 or better on the ACT…and these kids do not have perfect grades because our school makes sure that they are challenged appropriately from ninth grade on.
@momofthreeboys Nope. And those AP science classes have been developed by professors at UIUC who met with our science teachers so that our kids are super prepared for what a college class will really be like. The kids who end up with 35-36 on the ACT and receive acceptances to Ivy League schools do not always get an A in these classes. And, for those who do, NO ONE has a 98 percent. That’s not even conceivable.
Actually, all schools officials I have talked with blame social media for the stresses on kids these days. That said, I have gone to School Committee meetings where stress is discussed and while the school tries to blame parents, I speak publicly about the pressures from the school for academic rigor and admission to great colleges, which make the schools look good. It’s not really about the kids, it seems!
We parents need to resist this stuff as much as we possibly can, knowing there are external factors our kids are dealing with that are out of our control.
Don’t listen to guidance counselors and let your kids take what they want to take. The irony is that with the personalized, “holistic” admissions at top schools, kids often do better with admissions when they follow their own path. But if top schools don’t get it, so be it, there are plenty of great schools out there.
Schools use grades as incentives, and in fact the whole education system uses grades. It helps, as Maine Longhorn mentioned, to not even look at the darn grades. We know who is working hard in our house.
I am not sure whether this discussion is even relevant to the more general idea of failure. Like many here, I have kids with serious medical challenges and they don’t seem to sweat the small stuff. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone but they don’t seem to have these anxieties about performance.
@momofthreeboys, it all depends on how you mark and the difficulty of exams and homework.
70% and above is First Class Honours and considered outstanding under the English system, for instance. When it comes to overall marks, only 10-15% of grads from top English unis graduate with a First and almost no one ever graduates with an average over 80%.
At the Ivy-equivalent where I went (when I went), science and math exams typically were curved with averages in the '60’s-70’s and the range from 30’s/40’s to 90’s. Roughly a third got A’s, a third got B’s, and a third got C’s. So the cut-off between A- and B+ was around 80. If you go 90+, you did awesome.
For some reason, below the higher ed level, Americans like to make their tests very easy (compared to the rest of the world). The difficulty of the SAT and ACT are honestly a joke compared to A-Levels and other uni entrance exams around the world (and probably why the most elite American colleges don’t put a lot of stock in to them). AP’s are more comparable to A-Levels, though evidently all except Physics, Chem, and Calc BC do not go as much in depth (but A-Levels Maths and Further Maths covers a broader range of mathematics).
At many colleges, especially those in the top 50 or so, the curves for engineering and hard sciences are quite steep. The raw scores are often quite low, the curves steep, and the drop rates for courses can be very high at times. And that is with students who primarily have ACTs in the 30 and up range. All of this creates a lot of anxiety.
I don’t understand why people are fixated on the percentages. D1 has assignments and even major projects where the average grade is around 30 or 40 percent, and that is the students who don’t drop. Profs can be brutal. The raw percentages don’t really matter. The amount they are learning matters.
@Much2learn Completely agree. That’s why I don’t get it when high school kids come on CC and say they have a 98 average. What the heck? Are they being challenged at all? This NYT article must be talking about the kids with that type of high school experience. The brightest kids at our high school are pretty psyched to get above an 80 percent in some classes. These kids are nose to the grindstone and self-motivated.
It’s not that I don’t know stressed out kids. Of course, some of them are still stressed out. But, to them, an 82 on an AP Physics test is reason for celebration. At least they’ll be comfortable with lower percentages on tests when they get to college. I remember my first Chem test in college. The median was a 36 percent. I was a wreck.
You are comparing apples and oranges. A-levels are taken in specific subject areas, just like APs. The SAT and ACT bear no relation to that sort of test.
They sound similar to a lot of older and same-aged undergrad classmates who had high HS stats from respectable/elite private day/boarding schools, graduated within the top 15-20%(including some vals), and not only took some APs…but even scored 4s and 5s on them and yet…still crashed and burned once they took actual college courses at our LAC.
One of them had turned down a legacy admission to an Ivy on the assumption our LAC would be much easier and allow him to have a more relaxing undergrad experience. Didn’t turn out that way at all for him at all.
Most US high schools compress the grading scale at the top end of the range, so that 60% of the grade comes from easy stuff that D students who barely pass can answer, leaving very little space for harder problems to challenge A students.
College, of course, spreads all of the high school A (or A and B) students over its grading range, and instructors are not bound to the high school percentage scale.
@homerdog I think our public HS is somewhat similar to yours. There are about 700 students and last year they announced that 235 of them has a 30 or higher on ACT.
There may be a few kids with straight A’s but if so, you could count them on one hand. In many science courses, an 80% is an A. In most courses 90% is an A. In BC Calc two years ago, all of the A’s and most B’s received a 5. I agree with you that no one gets a 98% in the tough courses. Even the Ivy league, MIT, Stanford bound kids are very happy to get any score above 90%.