I have not know anyone who was allowed to have gpa adjusted during a transfer. Not saying that it doesn’t ever happen, but it is usually addressed in GC letter.
@gardenstategal OK, good to know that dropping out is not a big deal at some schools. This is highly frowned on at our school as the school subsidizes the exams, and the extra teachers, small class size (not wealthy school district/high free lunch). They have a lot invested in the program and there is a lot of pressure for students to complete the two-year program. And yes, our daughter got a 38 on her first HL Chem exam, but ended the year with an A- so the year long courses give you time to improve!
^^ @cafe9999, wow!! Good for her!
Agree that the peer group continuity and solidarity of IB Diploma kids can also be a good influence – since AP is an “a la carte” approach, a student wouldn’t necessarily have class with the same core group of kids. For IB, at many schools, the Diploma kids are a subset of the entire student body so the IB kids become their own best support group, because they share this intense experience.
In terms of dropping, again, it varies by school, but at our school, plenty of kids move from Diploma program to “certificate only” kids as they move through the program. Certificate kids don’t get the “most rigorous” curriculum, as they take some, but not all of the required Diploma elements, and don’t have to do Extended Essay, Theory of Knowledge, or CAS.
I would not worry too much about whether AP or IB best prepares a student for standardized tests. My older daughter’s school offered neither AP or IB and she scored very well on both ACT and SAT subject tests. Your daughter sounds bright and hard working, I am sure either format will be fine.
Regarding her learning style, transfer of GPA, ranking, what constitutes most rigorous curriculum, etc., others have weighed in already so I won’t repeat those thoughtful comments.
Good for you for moving your child and favoring her social wellbeing over other priorities!
This is not necessarily true. It would depend if the building is open (my building is not open during the summer and my kids are attending summer school and taking the NYS regents exam at another building). In many school districts, not every high school is open. Many schools consolidate for students who need to do summer school as a cost savings.
Schools are also rent out the building over the summer to different programs (day camps, etc). While the physical building may be open and someone answers the phone, the school staff may not necessarily be there.
While principals are 12 month employees with approx 3/4 weeks of vacation in the summer, they will be working at what ever site their kids are attending summer school (which may not necessarily be in their building).
The guidance counselor year ends at the end of the school year (at NYC DOE it was June 28). Yes, there are some GCs that work summer school, but they are usually not assigned at the school where they work during the school year. They are due back the day after labor day with the rest of the teaching staff.
My recommendation to Op is to breathe. Your child will probably not even be added to the roster at the new high school until it is time for school to be in session again. It is highly unlikely that anything is going to be done until your building opens for the next school year. Ok, you will send an email to the principal, and guess what? The principal is going to forward it to the GC, who will take care of it when they return at the end of the summer. Familiarize yourself with the programming at the new school so that you will be able to ask the right questions.
What you want to know is that because your daughter will be coming in as a junior, she most likely will not be part of the ranking. How will this be handled in her recommendation.
Get at least 2 copies of your daughter’s transcript from the school. One signed and sealed copy for the high school, so that they can use it as a certified copy to send with her high school transcript when she applies for college.
You want to know if the grades will be added to her transcript. Some public schools only give transfer credit and the grades from the old do not get counted at the new school. Some schools will include the grade but may only have ABCD+/- where you came from a numerical system.
You want to be able to get a credit check to make sure that your child is on track to graduate from the new school. For example; if your child attended a parochial school, religion courses will not be transferrable. If your private school did not take state exams, your child will need to take the state exams needed as part of the graduation requirement at the new school. If there are some state exams that your child should have taken but did not get to take, find out if she can take the exams during the summer session.
Yes, I was able to get D2’s honors weighted at the new school. I worked very closely with the school to make sure she was able to get into necessary classes. Her new school didn’t rank, but they did name their Val & Sal, also checked off if the student was top 1%, 5% or 10% on the LOR.
The good public in my city often sends more kids to the super elite (Ivies, Stanford-level) schools than the selective fancy-pants private. Just sayin’. It has AP, but no IB. It is a large, diverse school that appeals to elite colleges because it is public, considered “urban or inner city” (with all its implications) but has a long history of sending grads to these universities – grads who excel there, too. Personally, I think sometimes going to the selective fancy-pants privates may be at times a disadvantage when it comes admissions to the super elites, which love to point out that 50% of their students come from public schools.
I’ve seen similar to @katliamom with our urban public schools. It doesn’t seem to hurt high achieving kids at all and if anything seems to help. I suspect some of these same kids heading off to elites from these schools would have had a harder time standing out at a high end prep school or rich suburban public.
I am still numb over “A mother has been bullying her.”
On getting grades adjusted to reflect the new school’s scale – we did manage to do that for our kid who transferred. It was more like opposite of weighting though – first school had a “stricter” scale, where an 85 was a B-, a 75 was a D. New school, an 85 was a B and a 75 was a C. We kept all the records of final, numerical scores from first school, and approached new GC after the transition had been made, inquiring lightly about how the transcript would appear. GC re-scaled the old grades to the new school’s grading scale, resulting in somewhat higher grades in some courses. We were advised to take a low key approach, rather than go in “guns a blazing” – it worked for us. Good luck to you!
AP or IB would somewhat depend on if you have the necessary pre-reqs wouldn’t it? The language requirement and the two year sequencing of some classes - thinking math here - might make IB hard. If no one is available at specific school, I’d be at district office. Would also closely look at GPA. The guy that finished #3 in D2’s year would have probably been Valedictorian if he hadn’t come from the small local muslim school. He didn’t come in with any honors “points.” But he did end up third and got major merit from Duke. If you can, try to get all the syllabi and reading lists and grades from private school to see if you can line them up with honors courses at new school.
My girls did magnet program that used AP courses with added senior thesis and some other
I may have missed where OP is from but here the GC work year round. There is one week around July 4th where everyone is off, but GC are mostly around during the summer and school is open with administrators present. If you are transferring in then you could have most of your questions answered by assistant principles or IB/AP coordinator.
The IBD starts in 11th, there should be no problem with a soph kid who already has 4 Aps under her belt… SL math is perfectly doable even from core currculum, HL math is usually the kids who do ab(maybe c) calc as sophs but HL math is a rarefied group, Even good math kids do SL as juniors then BC calc as seniors. As OPs new school is both, this should be entirely doable. IBD can have 2 SLs finished at the end of junior year. Chem honors or AP as a soph should be good enough for HL chem, HL physics again is a rarefied group and usually kids will have honors or physics 1 asa soph as a lead in. IBD for science and math kids is sometimes frustrating, but for normal kids, it should be just fine. We see kids who will not do the iBD so they can sit more than 4 HLs.
First I would find out how to officially register for school and do whatever paperwork is needed. I doubt that would be closed all summer. Then you can find out when guidance is available or what you need to do to get set for classes when school starts. Our guidance gets a few weeks off but also works a few weeks. However we have a centralized location to get students into the system for grades k-12 which if anything is only closed the week of July 4th. If it isn’t available online they can most likely at least give you an electronic or written copy of the program of studies to look at which includes things like gpa scale, graduation requirements, course descriptions etc.
Rather than immediately focus on IB vs AP I would have your daughter browse and see without any pressure to make a decision which classes sound the most interesting. We also have an extremely diverse public school that gets good results for qualified students and percentage wise just as good if not better than the public lottery charter school that has the IBD. Some students leave there because they want the freedom to do classes not available through the IB program. Some parents also feel that they have a better chance of being at the top of the class because they have an IB background and are dismayed to find that isn’t necessarily the case.
Personally since you seem to have actual colleges in mind already I would call their admissions and see if they feel there is an advantage of one over the other in a school that offers both.
I suppose the gist of things here is that you need to be really proactive WRT classes in a public school. If you have been used to a certain level of service and you are now going to a school like my kid’s school (IBD through special ed, barely out of title 1 classification, GCs have 400 kids, homeless/ refugees are going to get priority over a kid from a private school) it is going to be a big shock. Classes are potentially already full at this point.
Do you mean Morehead- Cain scholarship?
I think you are naturally anxious about this transition and might be overthinking things.
The GPA transfer problem can be addressed by the GC or by your daughter when applying. IB or AP should be according to interest, meaning the actual classes- as well as a sane workload. I would not worry so much about ACT and SAT either. Many top colleges aren’t even emphasizing them http://fairtest.org/university/optional (though merit scholarships often require scores) and for the elites, meeting a benchmark is important but after that it is about other things. (UChicago just joined the test-optional list)
Speaking of elites, make sure your daughter applies to schools that are a good “fit” and stay away from defining that according to prestige. There are many many great schools out there. So take the pressure off.
I think the main focus should be on getting over the trauma of whatever happened. If it was severe enough over a period of years, your daughter’s mental health is more important than grades or getting into an elite. Add to that the stress of the transition to a new school and she needs a lot of support.
Take the pressure off yourself- and her- and try to make life enjoyable again. If she doesn’t have counseling, that might help too. Focus on high school- not college admissions.
In the summer after her sophomore year my daughter transferred from an elite public school to a small, not as well regarded private school because of the tremendous academic pressure at her public school. The new school had fewer APs and sent fewer kids to the top schools. It did not hurt her at all. She went to Wellesley for undergrad and is headed to Harvard this fall.
Although going to certain prep schools helps with college admissions, by and large, colleges admit individual students, not the programs they came from.
College Adcoms read your application relative to the programs, school, region. You could be a very special individual student, but if they have 10+ very special applicants from that same program/school/region, they are not going to admit all 10.
IB is, well, different.
My daughter completed an IB diploma program. Kids destined for the diploma program in grades 11-12 took special pre-IB courses in grades 9 and 10 that were taught in a sort of IB style. They also covered somewhat different material than the regular honors courses did. These courses were specifically designed to prepare the students for IB.
If a kid had joined the program in grade 11 (which was impossible in our school system, but hypothetically speaking), that kid would have had different preparation in grades 9 and 10 and might have had a great deal of difficulty adjusting.
When you speak to the public school, you may want to find out whether the curriculum of future IB students differs from the standard curriculum in grades 9 and 10.
The only specifically preIB classes in grades.9 and 10 at our high school are in English. Otherwise freshmen and sophomores just take honors and AP classes.