<p>Mal and Pink my Calc BC teacher has the 30 best math students of our school in his class and is taking great pleasure in giving Fs, especially 1st sememster - had kids freaking out, kids with near perfect gpa's getting Cs, D's and F's and knowing that colleges were going to see these grades. Does seem like a math test would be an easy non disputable grade but this guy will take 3/4 of a point (out of 1) off because you didn't do the problem the way he likes - the right answer gets one quarter of a point. But in another question he may reverse that and take off more for the wrong answer and give less credit for calculations!! I firmly believe he wants to stick it to the high achieving kids. So yeah, I totally agree with Mal77, without a doubt!</p>
<p>^ I've got a teacher like that, but it doesn't worry me too much (knock on wood) because I think the Yale adcoms know there are teachers like that. I have a sneaking suspicion they evaluate what kind of student you are using your GPA (not specifically for any classes), and a comparison to the teacher recs. So, if your Chem/English teacher both say "Yeah, ____is in the top 1% of my career", and give you many other healthy marks, Yale will know it's unlikely a dedicated and committed student just drops all of their study habits at the math classroom door.</p>
<p>Pink is correct. The QB financial aid can be confusing. You have to read through each college's section of the QB website carefully to make sure you know what the situation is for each. In the case of Yale, Princeton and I believe all of the other non-binding schools, the FA package is exactly the same as it would be had the applicant not applied through QB. MOST of the binding schools guarantee a particular package. But some of the binding schools such as Columbia and Emory do not.</p>
<p>Yeah, like I said earlier, my teacher does not want me to go to Yale. He outright told me in my face and spoke to me for like half my lunch period.
I was nodding at his talk but I was not digging his talk inside my head. Let me tell you about him:</p>
<p>He went to a community college for two years, then to a state school. He did not graduate anywhere hear top 25%. Mind you, he told me all this, thinking his "sad story" was making me nod and rethink my application. </p>
<p>After state school, he went to grad school and studied A TOTALLY DIFFERENT SUBJECT. I think he was like top 15%, but that is because the school is way down. If you are in grad school, you do not graduate in ranking do you? He must have lied to me! There is no ranking in grad school, the school is a nothing school right now, and he is wooow!</p>
<p>Then I ask him what he is going to give me. After telling me he will give me an A before I told him about Yale, he said he will give me a C! A "C!" He brought up some assignment that I was the first to complete and said I made some mistake. He said my class participation is bad, and then went on and on! </p>
<p>He is basically throwing my life in the sea and expecting the Egyptian kings, Israel, Moses or his mother to pick it up! He basically does not like the Ivies and top schools, but he worships the many professors in there. Who is this guy? Speaking to alumnus, I heard a lot about him.</p>
<p>bluewhite - tell him you "rethought" your school of choice/ got "rejected" by Yale and decided to go to your local community college/basic university (ya know, all the one's you see/hear advertisements for). Then mention that _____ College puts an emphasis on math grades so you'd appreciate it if he reconsider the grade he's going to give you. Trust me. If this sad, pathetic so-called teacher is going play dirty games to stop you from going to a great college, you should go to GREAT lengths to ensure he doesn't screw you over. I'd pull out all the stops. Get in contact with your counselor, principal, superintendent, even gov't officials if you have to resort to drastic measures. Do what you gotta do. :) I've been down this road before as well. Nothing changes grades better when you have the superintendent threatening to fire him and a local news channel investigator team on the phone!</p>
<p>public school. does not work like that. I am going to make sure that grade is made better.
I am waiting till April, then I will tell more info about him. Till then, know that he is nothing good. I catually told him that I did not apply to Yale.
Told him that I applied to the crappy school he went to and am competing for a scholarship. That does not make sense because I should qualify for it automatically, but I do not care. His arguments about issues are always based on numbers. He is so complicated! It is sad that someone like him should end up in our class, and there are somethings that he does not know, and is totally oblivious. He thinks that schools like Yale only give merit scholarships. He thinks that few people can afford Yale and he STILL thinks that it is ONLY rich kids who end up at Yale. How!</p>
<p>public school as well, but maybe your school is different. Anyways, it's sad that he has to get his (incorrect) personal beliefs mixed up with your grades.</p>
<p>Not even public school is that BS... I go to a undistinguished public school in South LA with a 10 percent college going rate, and my teachers were ecstatic that I was applying outside the usual CSU/UC norm. </p>
<p>Talk to your parents! This is clear lawsuit/discrimination territory. I'm not even joking. Have your parents file a complaint to the district, and then get a lawyer.</p>
<p>Hahah, parents cannot afford a lawyer. I will meet with my principal.
Icestorm, what do you mean by ecstatic? Were they happy or ****ed?
I really do not care about him right now. I will not change the class.
I just spoke to an alum; he told him the same thing and wrote a rec for him, to that school. That was before though. I never thought of him as someone to write a rec cuz he is a 12th grade teacher. I figures, if he writes me a letter, an 11th grade rec for someone else may count more. I might have been thinking too much.</p>
<p>Ecstatic? Did you mean to Gryffon's 48th post? </p>
<p>I'm sure anyone teaching at a school with a 10% college rate would be happy when a student goes to college, let alone an Ivy league school.</p>
<p>You don't have to resort to lawyers... yet. Just get your point across to the school and mention that you might escalate it to higher people (if it applies)/consult a lawyer (even if that isn't a viable option right now) if they don't cooperate. The possibility of a huge scandal might just be enough for them to change their minds. (My district has this "image" they're trying to form so they go to great lengths to preserve it.)</p>
<p>By the way, I wasn't really kidding about the local news investigators. I don't know about yours but mine are pretty great. They handle all sorts of things, like the whole Kwame Kilpatrick scandal to local companies who price gouge. They're great because they can get a story out of it, you get your grade fixed, and the school's reputation can get partially saved by the news attributing it to just a "clerical error" or something like that. (Of coarse, I'd save this option as a last resort)</p>
<p>smoda: </p>
<p>yeah, you're right, I think it's that I have a really "hands-on" adcom. I, like you, highly doubt that everyone is getting a letter for one B-. </p>
<p>Goodschoolhopefully: </p>
<p>that's exactly how it is at our school! My AP Calc class has the top-ranking kids at our school, and we only have maybe a couple A's. Everyone is freaking out! Actually, if you compare my B- to what most kids got, I was on the much higher end of the grade spectrum. Most kids got C's, and a lot of kids got D's or F's. </p>
<p>The thing with my AP Calc teacher is he LOVES to push us to the ultimate limit; he basically believes that we've been babied, and that unless we get some F's once in a while we're just gonna be cocky little bastards for the rest of our lives. He thinks that if he tortures our GPA's, we'll realize we're not so smart after all, and we will study really hard for the AP exam. This, in turn, will result in more passes. This will make him look better as a teacher (he always posts the percentage of his kids who pass the AP exam, and constantly gloats about how high above the national average he is.)</p>
<p>And yeah, I know what you mean about knocking off useless points. He is known for doing things such as, if a problem asks you to find a function and then sketch the graph (easy enough, right?) and then you do all the math and then just draw a quick sketch, he'll knock off a bunch of points because "your graph wasn't CURVY enough." what?!?!? lol. I clearly had the right equation, and my graph WAS curvy. Okay maybe there was a slightly pointy spot where my hand naturally fidgeted as I was trying to draw a perfect curve. My BAD.</p>
<p>Don't get me wrong, he's an EXCELLENT teacher. But he is still a jerk. And my B- is considered GOOD in his class (most kids got so mad when they hear me complain, and let me remind you again that these kids are the highest-ranking kids in the school who would normally be appalled by such a grade.) </p>
<p>I never explained any of this to my adcom though. I just told him that it was all my fault, and that I would do better. I didn't want to come off as whiney or trying to blame someone else, even though my AP Calc teacher really IS psycho.</p>
<p>I think Calc BC is like that in a lot of schools though. It certainly was like that when I took it. First of all, to get into the course, you need a really high average in the previous honors math course. My year, there were only 8 BC students. Cs and below were VERY VERY common on tests. </p>
<p>That being said, college math IS a LOT more intense than high school math. I think a lot of BC teacher recognize this and are just trying to prepare us for that math. We definitely covered a lot more material than was on the test, and I was extremely well-prepared for the test. I also think colleges understand the low grades in BC phenomenon.</p>
<p>Yeah, you would think that they'd understand the difference. Same here, if a kid gets a C on a Calc test there is a sigh of relief, followed by sympathetic glances at the plethora of kids who failed. </p>
<p>I mean, it's not like I got a B- in Food and Nutrition (at our school, that's synonymous with "biggest blowoff class ever where you get credit for baking cookies and watching movies")</p>
<p>Wow, BC is so much easier at my school than at other schools. Here, the class is a joke, even though we've covered all the BC topics already and are already on to multi-variable calculus. In fact, the grade I got in BC happens to be my highest grade (A+) this year (well, except for Band, but then, you know, it's Band lol). If someone gets an A-, they pound the table in aggravation. Seriously. I guess it helps that the teacher is an MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley graduate (Ph.D from Berkeley on a full fellowship grant), so he's an awesome teacher (and guy), and I'm surrounded by geniuses in the class, but yeah, I feel for you guys- what unethical jerks you guys are stuck with. Good luck with everything!</p>
<p>Unethical! I forgot that word. I will use that in my statement. I am going all out on that teacher.
What time is "too late" to report this teacher? If he costs me Yale... I do not know what I will do.</p>
<p>Hey pianoguy.... Are you still managing to maintain that A+ in calc bc?</p>