I have often wondered the same, OHMom.
But if they want kids that have a high rank, then they are endorsing the rat race. To get a high rank in a school that has many APs, the student has to take the APs. But why does it even make sense for a prospective English major to spend the necessary and considerable time it takes to do AP Bio and AP Chemistry, if they don’t have that bent? The rather tedious (for an English major) memorization required for those tests isn’t doing the English major any good, compared to reading good novels or writing.
They are equivalent schools, but they do not have the same selection schemes is what I am getting at. There are some (a couple among the several I mention) schools in that score range or higher where having more laundrylist EC’s and high stats is certainly a solid ticket to a very high chance but as @ucbalumnus just suggested with his commentary (and it anecdotally confirms my suspicion), some schools are clearly looking at something else and are willing to give slightly more room for error on the stats if you are really something special in terms of awards (again like regional or national/international level). In fact, it appears that once you cross the threshold mentioned for a place in the Stanford range, the person with lower stats who truly specialized or did extremely well in certain areas had an advantage over perfect Patricks and Patties stats. wise but who didn’t have credentials quite at a particularly special level. It is indeed splitting hairs, but some students should recognize these differences so that they don’t get mad when “they’ve done everything right” stats wise and have the seemingly perfect EC laundry list and are then denied by that school and picked up by another that may have a “lower reputation” but higher stats. Then they go on to say, admissions at “X school” isn’t based on a true meritocracy (exactly what elite school is, other than Caltech which people claim to be close if you just want the stats to correlate perfectly with admissions, though even then, they are looking for the true prizewinning students). However, after a certain point, they just develop a different definition of “merit”. All that can be said is that the selection schemes of any of these “elite” schools can be frustrating for any household that wants a child to go to them. However, one wonders when the “paper perfection isn’t exactly the magic ticket” message will sink in so that students who are high achievers have other goals in mind other than getting overly wrapped up in the mere end of getting into Harvard for example
Ranks are done differently everywhere and only half of hs even offer APs.
I think you misunderstand what I’m saying…I’m speculating that schools don’t want a high class rank specifically but that the kids they want for various reasons happen to also have one the majority of the time.
My D, accepted to a number of elite colleges, didn’t have top 10% rank but did have almost perfect test scores, high rigor and good but not perfect grades. An anecdote does not make a case, but it has led me to wonder.
IF (as many who attend selective universities aren’t) you are at a school that reports rank, sure you may want to be in the top decile (made up word?)…otherwise, for a place like Stanford, if you have a great GPA (one that has a history of success if from a known school) and get your SAT near whatever their IQR range is (again, a tad lower than some others) and truly excel in an area well enough to get attention (and you need not necessarily compete directly against classmates as it may be in something that not as many of them are into) or recognition beyond the local level, you may have a shot. In which case, that should be turned into a personal race to get really good at what they enjoy and not an attempt to follow whatever else is going on at the school (that may actually diminish your chances as all the applicants will look alike and will likely be sorted based on performance or leadership with whatever common EC at the school).
I understand what you are saying: elite schools pick who they want without much regard to rank, but by the veriest coincidence the students they pick have a high rank.
I don’t believe it, that’s all. Schools don’t care about rank, and they don’t care about taking the most rigorous course load and getting high grades (which is correlated with rank)? Yeah, sure. Why do they ask for rank and rigor, if they don’t look at rank and rigor?
And being a recruited athlete at the top schools generally doesn’t mean much of a break either. The Haverford track coach says he pays attention to not only whether his prospects have taken AP’s, but also whether or not they are AP lite, like AP Environmental Science.
You may be right, I’m just speculating.
But rigor and grades don’t always correlate with rank. At my kid’s school, rigor worked against rank until her 11th grade year when they decided to weight APs (and it worked against S12 the whole time as his APs were never weighted). The school still doesn’t weight “pre-AP” classes, the harder versions of 9-10th grade courses.
Ranking formulas vary a lot by school so may not carry the importance of grades and rigor, is what I’m saying I guess.
Many schools don’t rank. From the Common Data Set, there’s a line for “percent of first-time, first-year (freshmen) students who submitted class rank.”
Here are the answers for certain popular colleges:
Princeton 29%
Stanford 35%
Harvard 50%
Yale 29%
MIT 42%
It would seem to me that moving away from ranking students would be a method for high schools to decrease the pressure on their student body. Many prep schools do not report class rank to colleges. The colleges can of course calculate the student’s GPA from the transcript, and if it’s a very popular college from that school, the college admission office will have an idea of the relative academic strength of the applicants. Sure, they’ll take class rank if you’ll report it, but do they need class rank?
Note that for these very, very popular universities, from half to almost 3/4 of enrolled freshmen did not submit class rank.
Exactly what I said on an early page of this thread.
Our HS stopped ranking a dozen or more years ago for this reason but brought it back in a very limited way (kids don’t see it, profile sent to colleges provides GPA decile table only, no val-sal) only because some scholarships, notably the bigger ones of our flagship, require a rank of top 3% or whatever.
Our school also stopped ranking several years ago, to bring it more in line with the private schools that do not provide rankings for their accomplished student bodies.
No idea how this affected merit scholarships that specified a required class rank, but it seems that greater numbers of students were admitted to elite schools.
@TheGFG -
"At least for my older kids, no important math placement tests were administered until 6th grade. Then they gave a test to sort out who was going to take algebra in 7th grade, 8th grade, or not until high school. The problem was, the test had algebra problems on it. So the very bright, intuitive kids would figure enough of them out, and the kids who had already been taught algebra outside school would also do well. But the smart kids who would be capable of learning algebra if taught it, would not be selected. D1 did not make it in, but I fought it. Though certainly not a math genius, she still scored over 700 on the SAT in math, and was smart enough to be admitted to an elite school and earn a degree in economics there. Yet the system told her she wasn’t smart enough in math to be in our school’s ordinary top math track (though in reality that’s not even the top track anymore, since plenty of kids are taking AP Calc in middle school). That’s baloney. "
Ok, let’s take this one claim at a time -
- Would you please give us an example of a problem on this placement test that "had algebra problems on it"? As another poster has suggested, it's much more likely that it used the kinds of pre-algebra thinking-skills problems to determine who was developmentally ready for algebra earlier.
- By your own admission, the "very bright, intuitive kids" were able to do well on the test with no special preparation.
- By your own admission, your daughter was around the 700 level on the Math SAT, putting her well below the top few rungs of math students.
In my opinion, this suggests that she was placed well by the school into her College-Prep level math track.
Your objection seems to be that some other kids were drilled enough that even though you don’t perceive those kids as being as smart as your own child, that they got into a higher math track. If kids who didn’t belong in a higher track ended up there, I’m sure they had plenty of trouble once they were confronted with harder work. That’s their problem, not yours.
“I think any child who is smart and capable enough to eventually be qualified for elite school admission, should have a fair shot at developing the necessary skills so that he can throw his hat in the ring senior year along with the other thousands and his application will have a realistic chance. In WWP and districts like it, very smart kids will be eliminated from contention for those schools, and for schools one and two rungs down, in elementary school, unless they participate in an expensive parallel school system.”
So now we get to the heart of the matter. You think that in spite of evidence to the contrary (school placement decisions, grades, experiences in Honors/AP courses, standardized test scores, and teacher comments), that your kids are “smart and capable enough to eventually be qualified for elite school admission” and you don’t want johnny-come-lately immigrants who work harder to look like better candidates, in spite of not having what you imagine to be more natural talent. Or at least more authentic membership in “America”.
I am also skeptical that an algebra placement test would test actual algebra. Pre-algebra usually has some very baby algebra in it, but I have to doubt the kids were being asked to solve quadratic equations, factor, or do other actual algebra topics on an algebra placement test.
Is this a standardized test, or a school-developed test? My kids were also made to take an algebra placement test upon entering middle school. (The school would not act on my placement requests for them (which were completely in line with the material they had completed in formal elementary school classes, for which they had grades and teacher recommendations).) Second kid had completed a standard 7th grade math program from one of the major publishers and had no difficulty getting a perfect or near-perfect score, don’t recall, on this standardized algebra placement test without having taken any algebra.
Well, of course! I totally agree with you.
My point is that the dynamic is, in my opinion, poisonous and harmful…and inescapable even with appropriate parental support. I believe you can act as a buffer and a voice of reason but that the day-to-day drumbeat of high stress/high competition takes its toll on everyone, not just those aiming for the Ivy sticker.
Those “IN TOP DISTRICTS” are not falling behind, despite your previous claim to that effect. Yes, those in lower quality districts are more likely to be behind, but it is not like they were not behind and are only now falling behind.
For example, taking calculus in 12th grade is what advanced students in math do. Just because an occasional really good student in math takes calculus in 11th grade, or a very rare math prodigy takes calculus in 9th grade or earlier does not mean that your kid taking calculus in 12th grade is “behind”.
You may be falling into hyper-competitive mode, always judging your kids’ accomplishments relative to others nearby (which may be encouraged by the hyper-competitive nature of super-selective college admissions), but that does not mean that your kids are “falling behind” because a few other kids may be ahead of them.
Interesting. Our elementary school had three levels of math instruction per grade, low, medium and advanced. We were not happy when one of our kids tested into the low group, so we hired a retired teacher for tutoring. Since then, the kid has moved from the middle to the advanced group, and has stayed there without tutoring.
Little did I know that I was not helping my kid, but I was perpetuating the inequalities inherent in the system.
You were doing both. And the question here is not whether we want Zinhead’s child to be tutored to become prepared to succeed in the advanced group. We do. The question is, do we want the other kid who is equally good as Zinhead’s kid, but whose parents can’t afford tutors, to languish in the lower group-- even though by hypothesis she is capable of succeeding in the advanced group? No.
We should not have a system where parents who can’t afford to pay get worse, less advanced instruction. But that’s what we have.
@“Cardinal Fang”
"You were doing both. And the question here is not whether we want Zinhead’s child to be tutored to become prepared to succeed in the advanced group. We do. The question is, do we want the other kid who is equally good as Zinhead’s kid, but whose parents can’t afford tutors, to languish in the lower group-- even though by hypothesis she is capable of succeeding in the advanced group? No.
“We should not have a system where parents who can’t afford to pay get worse, less advanced instruction. But that’s what we have.”
I don’t disagree with this, but the people I’ve heard opposing tutoring on this thread, are not representing kids who can’t afford tutoring, but kids who don’t feel like engaging in tutoring, and want everyone else prevented from doing so.
Heading out for a bit, but D was told she had the second highest standardized test (it was the GEPA then) score in the middle school, and also qualified for the JHU talent search/was invited to state awards program. I don’t remember her middle school SAT scores, because we did not plan to have her participate due to cost. So actually, other standardized tests showed her to be capable. The placement test was designed by the school. Regardless, I repeat that unless you really want to make the claim that non-Asians are dumber and lazier, then my child aside, how do you explain the group’s poor representation in the district’s advanced math and AP program? Non-Asians are so rare my kids were dubbed by their classmates an “honorary Asian.”