At least they waited til senior year to panic. What about all the posts - I got a B this year. I’m a freshman. Can I still go to an Ivy ?
Yep the world has gone bonkers.
Based on the short comment, I don’t think we can assume the kid was under an tremendous amount of pressure to be perfect. If he/she was under such pressure, I wouldn’t expect to suddenly get 2 B’s. Another possible explanation is the kid attended one of the many HSs for which the vast majority of students get A’s in any particular class and extremely few get grades below B. He/she may have had a case of senioritis after being accepted, resulting in getting some grades in the lower half of the class.
While I don’t know for certain what happened in this particular situation, I do agree that some students are perfectionists. I hear about this most often when there is a high concentration of students with a goal that they believe depends on achieving near perfect grades. An example, is students attending a HS for which a high concentration of students are focused on attending highly selective colleges, such as TJ. There was a story a few years ago about a girl at TJ who went so far as to give her parents false acceptance letters describing a special program that involved dual enrollment to both Harvard and Stanford, dozens of pages of communication with professors at the respective colleges, etc. The admissions hoax eventually received nationally media coverage.
There was also an earlier news story about a student attending a different competitive HS who took a claimed false admission further, actually living on campus at Stanford for 8 months, in spite of not being accepted or officially attending the college. Without having a room key, she’d do things like climb in to her room via the window.
We tried for years to work on DD’s self-driven perfectionism; we actually had therapists work with her on the concept of half-assing things. Perfectionism was just one of the ways her neurodivergence presented; it was right or wrong, black or white, no in between. Years of telling her it’s ok to not be perfect, and one crappy engineering class ended up helping more than anything else. It was a 5 credit Statics & Dynamics class; when she went to the first class, they asked if this was their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time taking the class 
She came out with a “B” and was ecstatic.
Typical Grade distribution:
A 2%
B 14%
C 25%
D 17%
F 22%
Withdrawal 20%
She still works obsessively, but she’s learning when to push hard and when to let up on the gas.
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Of course it won’t. One daughter referred to organic chemistry as “the most difficult B- that I ever had in my life”. She still had multiple acceptances to very good DVM programs (which isn’t any easier than admission to MD programs – and the required classes are the same as far as I know). A few B’s here and there won’t stop your daughter and mine from being called “Doctor TwoGirls” and “Doctor DramaMama” in a few years.
At my daughter’s orientation for incoming DVM students multiple speakers stressed that “C’s get degrees”. The program was full of students who had never gotten a C in their life, but who were about to get a few of them.
I have one daughter who still has had only one B in her life (in a high school history class). I was very glad when she got it. She needed to learn that you do not need to be perfect in life – her parents still loved her and her friends were still her friends. I went out with her for ice cream that day on the way home from school. I have very mixed feelings about her graduating university with only A’s. It is cool that she could do it. I hope that she knows that she did not need to do it. I don’t actually know how much I should be impressed and how much I should not mention it.
Way back when I was in high school there was no one in the entire high school with straight A’s. Only one single student in the high school had an average over 90 (it was not me). I am wondering whether this is less stressful since no one expects to have straight A’s. However, the lower stress might be more based on how university admissions is done. In Canada if you are near the top of your high school then you get accepted to McGill, Toronto, UBC, or wherever else you want to go (in the country). There is no university in the country where admissions is a reach if you are strong enough as a student – and this does not require straight A’s.
I saw this happen at Stanford. However, I was a graduate student there so we all had the advantage that every class was in our major or a closely related field.
Yup. As parents we need to be careful about this. It is hard to balance pride in our children doing well versus putting too much pressure on them.
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Although that name might keep me from ever scheduling my physical from her 
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I don’t think this is especially unusual. In the most recent senior survey I found (class of 2021), the median reported GPA at Stanford was 3.9. With A+ = 4.3, I expect a significant portion of students are >4.0.
When I was a student, they gave a variety of awards during commencement. One was an award for the engineering school student with the highest GPA, which was ~4.2, indicating the majority of his grades were A+. However, he did get one B+ grade. The professor who gave the B+ grade went to the stage and gave a bow.
There are several contributing factors to the high GPA at Stanford. Grade inflation and the A+ grade contribute, but so does perfectionism. A good portion of entering freshmen have never received a non-A grade in their life. After first semester midterms, they had psychological counselors come to our dorm as a preventative measure because some students struggled to come to terms with getting their first non-A grade. I knew one woman who would repeat courses for a new grade, if she got an A- because she didn’t want to have an A- on her transcript, which she thought would negatively impact med school applications.
Seems like repeating an A- grade would look worse on a medical school application than having just the one A- grade for the course.
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I think there is one positive thing that adults who worry about this with college age kids can do- and that is to highlight all the incredibly interesting and valuable careers out there that are NOT physician, CS or investment banking.
CC gets toxic some times-- and I get criticized and a lot of pushback when I point out that majoring in English and getting a job at an ad agency, or majoring in psych and getting a job in consumer products marketing, (etc.) is a fine career choice, which doesn’t create the kind of needless anxiety that these other uber competitive fields require. I don’t know why the CC crowd knocks me down- but it is my little contribution to the cause of mental health.
I want to scream every time a kid posts about being pre-med, never sleeping, how will they ever find time to shadow, research, get all A’s, etc. For kids who love what they are studying- fantastic. Time management is a great life skill. But for kids who hate it- all of it- and are only doing it because Mom and Dad would consider their entire lives an abject failure if the kid didn’t end up as a doctor?.. I dunno.
Every medical breakthrough-- every vaccine- has tens of thousands of professionals in supply chain (getting the vaccine from the factory to your Walgreens), finance, communications, human resources, occupational safety, package design, etc. What’s wrong with those careers?
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A little off topic but somewhat related. One of the worst things about this college process is when highly selective schools send countless amounts of mail encouraging kids to apply.
Many of these kids think the college process is a meritocracy when we know that’s only somewhat true. If only they work a little harder, they can get into Univ Chicago or Northwestern. They dedicate their high school careers for that 4.0, 15 APs, hundreds of volunteer hours only to be crushed with low acceptance rates because they didnt fit the schools’ constructed profile.
These colleges talk about the importance of character and citizenship while they send mass marketing to build up their application list.
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What struck me most about the FB comment was that the PARENT was worried that 2 Bs would get her kid’s acceptance rescinded.
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I get mailings from my local Mercedes dealer all the time saying “it costs less than you think to drive a Mercedes”.
First of all- no it doesn’t. I know what stuff costs.
Second- in what world do I criticize the character and citizenship of the car dealer for sending out a mass mailing? And if I were interested in a Mercedes- but didn’t pass the credit check-- do I get “crushed”?
No time like the present to teach your kids about the glories of direct mail and zip code marketing.
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First, there’s a difference between a for-profit company who is trying to make money and an institution of higher learning who sends mail to children encouraging them to apply to a school that most cant get in.
Second, the ability to purchase the car is based on an objective standard and not because they liked your essay on shopping at Costco.
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Really there isn’t.
We could argue if an analogy is apt but make no mistake that these non profit colleges are businesses.
And they don’t really care who applies as long as they do.
Why else is Chicago waiving app fees for rich kids and WUSTL sending late marketing pieces with app fee waivers asking you to apply when you weren’t even on their student requested info list.
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My kid got “personalized” emails from a bunch of highly rejective colleges telling her how she would be a great fit for them. She said “how do they know” and I said “they don’t”. And I don’t think Harvard was just trying to make itself known to candidates. Distasteful tactics in my opinion.
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Harvard is mad at you for not lowering their acceptance rate even more.
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It wasn’t even emails now that I’m remembering better. It was fancy letters in the mail. I have no idea where they got her name. But it definitely makes teenagers think “hey if Harvard wants me I must be special”. Which they are to us, but not to them.
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As someone whose early career was sending the mailings, there really isn’t. Non-profits & schools are in fact businesses. It just takes sitting in one meeting with them to see and hear it. Their push for revenue increases is the same as for-profit businesses. Sending the mass mailings is a way to generate revenue and decrease their acceptance rates with a small fraction of hoping to find a rare gem mixed into the plan.
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I haven’t read your thread but love the title. The main problem here is the word “We”. That is the problem with lots of families and this was pointed out to me very early in my CC journey. “We” aren’t applying to college. The child is. This is where many parents go wrong.
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This is why I like those highly rejectives that don’t send mailings or emails at all during the whole process.
I’ve always found the whole mailing thing curious. Perhaps it’s because we asked both of our kids to never opt in for communications when signing up for SAT and the like, but neither received any mailings, pamphlets, or brochures from any college. Both graduated high school with 4.0, both had very high SAT scores (one had perfect score), and both were admitted to highly selective colleges ( Stanford and Johns Hopkins). Curious.