I bet your daughter is in top classes. 
And yes, we (humans) know more now, so there is more content in the schools than in our day. Progress is good.
But there are still those who can’t or don’t want to do higher level academics.
There isn’t one “single” group of “all students” out there and never was throughout history.
My point is: so was I.
Still…
It was my feeble attempt to compare apples with apples (that incidentally didn’t fall far from the tree.)
Note that there was a drop after 2020 due to COVID + remote learning. A graph from the NCES is below.
However, the graph below displays average scores. The proficiency of average students has little to do with students at highly selective colleges , who often score 99th+ percentile on this type of measure. I’d expect students at highly selective colleges are typically more academically proficient than in the past due to increased selectivity, including at Harvard. A large portion of kids that were admitted 20 years ago would not have been admitted today. i don’t think the out of context anecdote about some students at Harvard initially struggling with one passage in one text of one class that was offered many years ago conflicts with this expectation.
This increased selectivity of some colleges contributes to the perfectionism discussed in this thread among this specific subgroup. However, the vast majority of kids do not fall within this subgroup. At many public HSs, including the one I attended, high achieving kids tend to apply to and attend in state public colleges. At the HS I attended in upstate NY, SUNYs were by far the most applied to 4-year colleges, and Cornell probably received more applications than all other Ivy+ colleges combined. Some students were still perfectionists, but I get the impression it was a very different atmosphere than occurs in many selective, private HSs.
My suburbs-raised daughter turned out to be a natural at this. It’s an odd thing. Generally it is a city people skill.
I was in college in the 1970’s and research was not rare.
What is NEW is kids being pushed into (or pushing themselves into) research because “Everyone knows” you can’t get into Med school without it. Employers look down on working at a fast food restaurant for cash when you could be curing cancer in a lab. Etc.
And CC feeds the fetish- how many kids post on here devastated because they can’t find a “research” position as a HS sophomore? And parents actually are giving them tips on how to talk their way into a lab!
Back in the day “working with a professor” was something you did. And was very common. And it ran the gamut of editing a book/article, fact-checking, verifying lab results, compiling an appendix or index (hard and tedious work), foot-noting, writing summaries of findings, data analysis, administrative check offs of safety procedures, assembling and verifying budget reports for the funders.
Which is-- by coincidence- what the last 50 undergrads who recently bragged to me about their “research” were doing (most of it computer enabled, thankfully, which was not the case in the 70’s when you had to stand in line at the computer center for an hour with your punch cards).
Better branding these days. But “working with a professor” was how you got punchy and vivid recommendations for grad school- even back in the 70’s-- and it was very, very common.
I think it depends on your school. At our HS APs are not available until junior year and the maximum number a student can take is 4. Honors courses are available in 9th & 10th grade. Top students usually take 7-8 APs. Despite having a lower number of APs than some schools our HS sends 5-10 kids per year to Ivy League schools so it doesn’t seem to hurt. S24 hasn’t found the AP course work particularly challenging or time consuming but that is going to vary by kid.
There is a diminishing incremental rate of return beyond a certain number of AP classes. Once you’ve established rigor in all the core subjects, other factors become increasingly important to distinguish top-rigor students.
Me too - and knowledge has changed since then, esp in science and modern history. Classes have changed too. We’d have been able to handle it if it had been presented to us.
Maybe it depends upon where you went. I went to VT and research was limited to grad students plus some lucky seniors. Not everyone who wanted to be was included in any field. Undergrads were expected to learn.
It’s common knowledge at our large, public high school that you have to take a full IB curriculum to have any chance at a decent class rank. My oldest loved being the yearbook editor, but it hurt her weighted GPA despite getting all As in every class. Kids are absolutely aware of weighted GPA.
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Agreed. I am happy the HS has structured it the way they have. Of course, there are aways a handful of super achievers (not my kid, lol) who self study additional APs. In general, I think my kids have gotten a good education and it certainly hasn’t been hampered by “only” being able to take 8 APs max.
Parents who pressure their kids for perfection rarely if ever admit that they put pressure on their kids to do well. They may not even know they are doing it. But kids know what’s up.
For example, when parents have nothing but distain for everyone and everything except for what they have determined is “elite,” whether it be schools, curriculum, classmates, activities, whatever, the kids pick up on that and are eager to please. And some arents even have a pecking order for AP courses yet still insis they don’t pressure their kids while scoffing at APs that aren’t “rigorous” enough, and claim that for certain majors kids need to be doing mid-level college math in high school or they won’t be successful. If you tell your kid that a degree from X is mediocre, that’s pressure. I you tell them that a Ph.D. is for those who couldn’t hack it, that’s pressure too. If you tell them they’ll never succeed in their chosen field unless they are multiple years beyond BC calc in high school, that’s pressure.
I have two very average kids. One was born very early and spent her first 90 days in the NICU just learning to breathe and eat. She didn’t walk, talk or have any teeth until she was 16 months old. Couldn’t really hold a pencil going into K (but had memorized the entire Wizard of Oz script). She got there at her own pace, had a few AP classes, went to college, and is now getting a masters. Pretty good artist too as she did learn to hold a pencil.
Other spent 2.5 years in an orphanage. I doubt she could walk before she was about 2, had most of her teeth rot out before she was 8 (no fluoride in the water, bad nutrition). Spent the next 3-5 years just learning English and how to walk, run, swim and all the things I’m sure all those top of the class kids were doing at age 3. She caught up, took 2-3 AP classes, became an engineer.
I’m sure mine are the kids you are referring to as slowing down the classes and not wanting to be in school. I think you are wrong. Mine had their own skills. My preemie can run many categories on Jeopardy! because she loves to read. She can barely add and subtract, but she can explain the exhibits in the British Museum and all about horses. And she’s kind, everyone’s friend, always asked to be a bridesmaid or to go on trips with her friends’ families.
The other can figure out just about anything like how to retile her bathroom or fix my storm door window (that a professional hung upside down) but reading is still hard for her. Produces a mean traffic study too. She is kind to dogs.
I wish most CC in schools were like this - some are for sure but many are not (due to competing agendas of parents, BoT, donors etc); They also steer kids away from Dartmouth bc they know they have legacies (using D as example) who apply and the more who apply ED - the harder it is fro ANYONE of them to get in.
Our old HS used to limit applications to 10/yr bc you dont want the Amherst/Williams level kid to be applying to all the top SLACs and then also be applying to Lehigh, Colgate etc as kids all canibalize each other from the same schools
I love the way you speak of your children (who sound wonderful). I wish more parents here spoke of who their kids are instead of focusing on a laundry list of academic accomplishments. If you aren’t kind who cares if you mastered calculus in the 8th grade.
Your kids don’t sound average at all! I love that you are able to describe all the amazing things that make them truly unique.
Why on earth would people opine about how others raise their children? How insufferably arrogant! My kids are happy; others’ opinions are neither solicited nor welcomed. You do you, as the kids say
Nvm
I apologize that my generalization made you feel that I was commenting on your kids, whom I don’t know.
Without reservation will I accept that you know your kids best, and their eagerness to be in school, their progress in their classes and their personal talents, whether academic or otherwise.
If they are a good fit for whatever AP classes, then I’m sure their subject teachers will recommend them based on their previous grades/requirements.
No they aren’t. If they aren’t acting up in school being behavior problems because they don’t want to be there - refusing to do homework or classwork, or worse - then they aren’t the problem.
As I said before, “level” doesn’t matter. Teachers love attitude and willingness to work. When I wrote LORs, the latter mattered quite a bit. I’d never overstate a kid’s ability, but… I never had a student rejected. Colleges look for the same things I think.
We’ve had several refugee students in our classes, some coming not even knowing how to say more than, “Hello,” in English. Almost all of them catch up and do very well with their lives whether college is involved or not. As one (from the Dominican Republic) told me, “I’ve seen what life can be like. I want better.” She did much better - even starting in classes with those who didn’t want to be there. She told me, “I wish I could show them what life could be like.”