D24 has 4 APs. She is seriously considering skipping one as the teacher is notoriously terrible and hasn’t even covered all the units much less done anything to prep them for the actual test. I wholeheartedly support the decision to skip- just seems like a big waste of her time.
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S24 also registered for 4 AP’s one of the AP’s was related to a online course he is doing. Due to his sports seasons he is running behind on this course and he will finish second semester over the summer. So we decided will not write the AP for this course rather than do it with half a done through the material. Hopefully this will help him focus on the other 3 AP’s for now.
So I think skipping the AP if your D24 does not feel prepared makes sense.
If the school doesnt require the test that makes a ton of sense. S21 and S24 both took AP lang at the same school. S21 had a terrible teacher and took the class basically blind and got a 3, S24 has a fantastic teacher and will do much better. If he had the same situation I would not have him bother.
As to AP tests, they can have great value if your student is considering attending a public University.
My D18 had 36-38 AP credits and went to Clemson. She entered with Sophomore status which gave her priority for class selection, football ticket lottery, housing etc. Because of her AP classes she was able to graduate in 3 years which was a big savings.
My D21 had a similar amount of AP credits and is attending Miami of Ohio. She has went in as Nursing major, changed to Mechanical Engineering after one semester and changed again after her Freshman year to Data Science and Statistics. Because of all her AP credits will still be able to complete that major and 2 minors Accounting and Computer Science in 4 years.
It is true that if student is looking attending private schools including T50 schools AP credits will not be accepted and may only be used if at all for placement.
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So did everyone see the two threads from the high stats kids who are upset about their admits. Seems these happen every year. Feel bad for both of these kids but this is a major lesson for our group. Definitely working harder on that safety and match list, there is no rhyme or reason to this and if you apply to safeties you dont love then there is major drama.
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What forum are those threads in? (or, if you don’t mind sharing a link - even better.) Thanks!
One is here
And the other:
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Definitely a sobering reminder that a list made up primarily of reach schools (and a safety your child doesn’t really like) can end up in a pile of rejections. Sadly, this isn’t the first of these stories, and, unfortunately, won’t be the last.
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One of the reasons it’s hard is because you only have so much time to make visits and try your best to do a deep dive to see if it’s a good fit. You will usually devote resources to the kid’s top picks which arent typically safety schools. And virtual visits to safeties may not move the needle for a kid.
D: I’d like to visit Brown and Duke
Parents: That’s great but let’s take a trip to Bloomington Indiana instead. (Nope).
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Yes saw the threads. Heart breaking for the kids. A good reminder about having more safeties and targets and being more conservative as to what a target and safety really is in the environment and your major.
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My take on those threads is that the kids didnt have proper guidance and that really screwed them.
I also believe the lack of guidance negatively impacted their overall application (not just school selection).
I cant imagine a 17 year old kid trying to navigate this process alone (or with little resources), especially at the highly selective schools where it’s an arms race and every nuance can matter and it’s not transparent.
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Both of those students made a critical mistake in applying to way too many reach schools…as in, their entire list was all reaches except for, like, 1 school.
I think that students also really underestimate the sheer # of super-highly-qualified/gifted HS students out there.
I also kind of wonder how those 2 students find time to eat and sleep with the sheer amount of stuff they have going on. Makes my kid look like a total slacker by comparison.
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100%.
That’s the pitfall. It is easy to fall in love with reach schools. They are usually the richest institutions in the best locations. It’s like looking at buying a new home and only looking at the real estate inserts for high end properties in the NY Times. Yes, that $12million ocean front estate does look really nice. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to the open houses of the homes for sale where you actually live that are actually in your price range. If you win the lottery, the high end real estate agent will be happy to take you on a private tour of the ocean front estate. Until then - your energy is better spent finding a house that fits your realistic budget.
So, why visit reaches at all? Or, why not at least save those visits until after decisions come out?
It is so important to spend the time/energy visiting the safeties/likelies in person. It’s actually not that hard to find schools that have a lot of same characteristics as ‘reach’ schools if the characteristics are what’s important. If the name is the draw - well, that’s a whole different conversation*.
You’re interested in math? I’m going to question that interest if you don’t have some public flagships on your list, and instead have only Harvard, MIT and Caltech.
You’re interested in small class sizes, strong professors and internship potential? Don’t tell me the only places that fit that bill are NESCAC LACs.
*17-18 year olds don’t come up with their list of colleges in a vacuum. There are a lot of ways to help build and shape your child’s college list. Saying/believing the only schools really worth your child’s time are ‘reach’ schools is a choice and, in my opinion a failure of information and imagination on the part of parent, child and possibly - high school counselor.
You wouldn’t listen to a 17-18 year opine that the only homes worth buying are the ones with every imaginable bell and whistle at a price you couldn’t afford in a city you don’t live in. You wouldn’t listen to them opine the only car worth driving is the expensive one with a years long wait list to buy it.
So why, when it comes to college, is the immature, unformed opinion of a 17-18 year old the driving force as to what schools do/don’t have value? Most 17-18 year olds don’t know how to look for schools, don’t have a wide enough base of knowledge about what is or isn’t possible at different schools and don’t know what they don’t know.
That’s why they need a parent to help them understand the importance of the likely schools, and the absurdity of the idea that only schools super hard to be accepted to have real value and potential.
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I think the biggest mistake those kids made is that they didn’t pick a safety that they actually would be happy to attend! The disappointment is understandable but to be in tears at the idea of going to your safety school, that should never happen. I went to my safety school 30 years ago and I was not thrilled about it but there were no tears.
And totally agree that they had poor counseling. Their adults definitely failed them.
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Actually, this is pretty much exactly what we’ve done with D24, investing time and energy into visiting likelies. We’ve visited several likelies which resulted in dropping some of those from the list after seeing them in person. D24 liked a few of the likelies, loved one of them, so those will stay on the list. Next step is encouraging her to do virtual tours for any reaches she might apply to. We will visit the reaches only if she gets admitted.
The irony for us is that D24 has already fallen in love with a likely and so might end up EDing to that school. Reaches might not even come into play at all.
We did the opposite strategy with D21, mostly visited reaches (let’s just say we didn’t know what we didn’t know). It worked out for her but she got very, very lucky.
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This!!! 100%
It is surprisingly easy to fall into the trap of applying to schools you think are safeties, but are in reality not safeties for you at all.
At one school, collegevine rates D24’s chance at 70%, while the university’s general acceptance was 60% last cycle. So far seems to make sense because her stats/rigor/ECs seem somewhat above average there.
But when drilling into the details on the college’s website, the major’s overall acceptance is something more like 30%, and when factoring in lack of URM/FG/veteran/etc. that further dropped to 20%. With other characteristics the actual acceptance rates were as high as 100%.
Most colleges do not provide nearly this level of transparency, so it would be easy to underestimate the difficulty of acceptance for a given individual.
Since she is wavering between 2 majors and one has a MUCH higher acceptance there, unless she has more clarity by the time applications are due I will encourage her to go with the one with the higher acceptance for her.
Seeing how this kind of thing plays out in real numbers at a real place has thrown me for a bit for a loop in trying to advise D24. Obviously major 1 is going to have to be treated as a reach at best, at this place and probably all the other colleges that might otherwise be match level.
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I sat down with S24 today to go over a study plan for APs. In the process of that, we ended up looking at his grades which are pretty much final (final tests aren’t graded but are taken in all but physics). It looks like he has B+s in Calculus (could go lower if he bombed the final, which is possible) and Physics (would have to get 95+ on final to pull it to an A). It is impossible to see his CS grade (the “teacher” has been absolutely terrible) but given how little he seems to understand, I feel like he’ll be lucky if it is a B.
I know those grades are fine, good even, but it is causing me a lot of stress, which I’m trying not to transmit to him. Between the grades and talking to him about studying for the AP tests, I feel like his understanding isn’t great. He did well enough on the material at the time it was covered in class & thought he understood it, but doesn’t remember it well enough for a cumulative final. He is a kid who “understands” new material easily, but does best with retaining it long term if he has to use it regularly. These classes just didn’t use that format.
Also, since S24 is homeschooled and these are online classes, we are finding he really doesn’t do well with this type of delivery method for learning material when it gets more complex. It was fine freshman and sophomore year, but this year with ZERO interaction with the teacher he just didn’t move his understanding from “okay” to “mastery” on his own but he didn’t realize it until now. 
I feel bad for him because he has worked really hard this year. His classes don’t have any point boosters, like points for attendance (no classes to attend!) or test retakes, and he didn’t have the benefit of interaction or feedback on his work from a teacher. And he feels like he has wasted his time this year since he really didn’t like the classes and he doesn’t remember the material well. Ugh.
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What is your plan for next year? Is there somewhere he can take in person classes as a bridge to college so that he can make sure that his understanding is where it should be? Geting Bs in some classes is not at all an issue, (as is often said only on college confidential are Bs bad!), not understanding the material or having it be taught rigorously is a bigger one.
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Not sure if I should say anything, since this is a parent’s forum, but since I’m one of the people involved I thought I should give my 2 cents. Sorry if I shouldn’t, not familiar with the etiquette here.
Adults definitely play a huge role in this whole process. My parents, and school counselor, for that matter, all thought I had perfectly fine lists, that I’d probably have my choice between a few of my top colleges, and were stunned when my results came in. Having adults around to give me reasonable expectations would’ve both improved my college list, and made rejections less of a blow. And when students are rejected, at least for me, telling them that it doesn’t say anything about them as people or that it’s part of god’s plan isn’t particularly helpful.
Very smart people in movies seem to almost always have degrees from prestigious places. Obviously, movies aren’t a reliable source of information about college admissions, but without outside grounding, my perspective on prestigious colleges was that if I worked hard enough, I’d get in. I obsessed over maintaining a 4.0 because I thought it was almost like some sort of machine: you put in hard work and show you’re an outstanding student, you go to a great college. Sometimes I’ve heard people will ask where you went to college as a way of judging your capability or intelligence. It seemed to imply complete causal linkage: you go to one of these places if you’re really smart, if you don’t, then you either aren’t or didn’t apply yourself, because then you would’ve.
The information about how much of a toss-up college admissions is is out there, but I didn’t really fully internalize it, and I suspect there are a lot of other people like me out there.
The first stats I saw regarding college admissions certainly didn’t help. Looking around at ivy league colleges, my SAT score was higher than the average pretty much everywhere. And I never even studied for the SAT! Surely that means I must have a good chance at getting in, right? There are only around 15,000 National Merit Finalists, and considerably more spots in top universities. And surely even less people have taken as advanced of math classes as I have in high school. Reed has over a 40% acceptance rate, and I’ve heard people mention it when talking about safeties, so at least there is a safe bet, right? Sure, academics aren’t everything, but, like, surely my stats will be good enough.
Parents really do need to be there to help students navigate this process. But they frequently aren’t, or don’t really help. Unfortunately, the parents that most need to realize that probably aren’t the ones already on this forum. It’s probably still worth saying anyways.
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