<p>That’s true, cap’n–great GPA and great grades alone will get you into a lot of schools. Those things are weighted very heavily by many schools to the extent that not much else will matter.</p>
<p>I’ve seen colleges that require hs IEP in order to grant any college accomodations. So now may be a good time to persue.</p>
<p>More colleges with one-at-a-time calendars:</p>
<p>Colorado College
Cornell College (this is the one in Iowa, not the U in New York)
Quest University in Squamish, British Columbia;
Tusculum College
The University of Montana - Western</p>
<p>My own exerience is that colleges do look at ECs. Founding the proverbial “Pie Club” or just participating in a string of at-school clubs may not impress anyone, but valid non-academic activities round out the picture of the candidate. And everything else I said above. The real question is: wanna trust that her college choices will ignore the lack of ECs (as a few posters suggest?) Or, wanna try a less chancey approach?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m not a parent so maybe you don’t want my thoughts on this. However, I feel like I must post because I am horrified by this! </p>
<p>If high school is hard, college is harder. A student studying this much at high school will struggle and probably fail at college when away from family and friends for support. Just simple practical things like doing her own laundry will be pretty difficult on this study schedule! Where would she find the time? I would be surprised if this student didn’t hate high school. Why would she want to sign up for at least 4 more years of this?</p>
<p>Are you putting a lot of pressure on her, consciously or subconsciously? Are parents/siblings high academic achievers? Is this student happy? Have you asked her? Have you told her you will still love her if she gets a 3.5? You think of course she knows this, but maybe not. If all her friends/family are high academic achievers, maybe she thinks she will be rejected if she doesn’t also achieve highly or kill herself doing so. </p>
<p>I know as a parent the OP is posting because s/he cares about their D. Probably this extreme study schedule appears normal if D has always studied like this. But it’s not. At some point I think this student will burn out, drop out and potentially end up with a lot of problems.</p>
<p>I don’t think you should wait till college to try and sort this out. It is a problem which needs to be addressed now.</p>
<p>I have a son with several LDs. You need to know that services provided for students with IEPs are not for kids to “use to their advantage” - they are there to level the playing field, so they are able to participate in school just like anyone w/out an LD.</p>
<p>What I would suggest, since you are apt to not allow her to identify her LD in college, that you seek a school out with trimesters, and take the minimum amount of credits allowed so that it will not mess with the FAFSA - which usually is around 9. Otherwise, odds are she will not get through. So what if it takes more than 4 years? How many years did it take your neighbor down the street to get through school 25 years ago, you know the one with the law degree? Or the teacher next door to them? You don’t know? Neither will anyone else as far as your daughter is concerned.</p>
<p>In the real world, it is not a weakness to have an LD. It is not something to be looked down upon. When the student is taught to work with it, they have the HIGHEST chance of success. Ignoring it is the best recipe for stress, anxiety, and odds are higher for failure than any other way.</p>
<p>Just my .02.</p>
<p>My usual quote to parents is, “Will-power trumps Brain-power on almost everything, except Jeopardy and crossword puzzles”. </p>
<p>But I’ve been thinking on OP’s post. The student’s work ethic is incredibly commendable. Still there seems no room left to ratchet up to the demands of many colleges. A good fit will be really important.</p>
<p>OP: You’ve been given some great advice by many. Our high school senior D3 has had a diagnosed LD since 5th grade related to expressive language–both reading comp and written expression. Basically, she is a concrete thinker. She worked with an educational therapist for 4 yrs and her private school was made aware of her challenge and progress. Although she still struggles with it, D3 was able to pursue ECs such as volleyball and yearbook. Most of her friends do not even realize she has a challenge. When it came time to putting her college list together, we made sure that in addition to her 3 reaches, there were reasonable matches and safeties…and that she applied early action to at least 5 schools so she would know the outcome by Xmas break and, perhaps, remove some of the stress. We are allowing her to apply to 10 schools…of which 3 were selected by DH and myself. In the end, it is all about the fit and which college will provide the support/enviornment for her to excel and be successful. Up to now, her self-esteem is totally intact…we want to keep it that way.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree. I am a student who keeps these kinds of hours in college and I am literally destroying my body with exhaustion and stress trying to keep up. I have made it to senior year but it is possible I will not be able to come back for my last semester because this semester was so awful, I have really hit the wall-- I managed to scrape through by pulling long hours in the past, but eventually you can’t do it anymore. I am doing well in my classes, it’s not that I am failing, but I am BREAKING. I have zero metabolism and my adrenal system is shot because I can never sleep, I am constantly feeling nauseous and faint from tiredness, I never get a break to relax and recharge and de-stress, I never see friends, literally the only break I ever take is to pop onto this website here and there, and I am HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE to make B’s. At any given moment I am at risk of failing all of my classes if I am not prepared to stay up all night (again). My metabolism is shot, I am on my FOURTH 101 fever/sore throat/achey/headachy sickness in three months-- and this was a pretty good semester for me in terms of cold/flu, and my mental state has become so dire that I have had to seriously consider dropping out to have myself committed. Kids can’t work like this forever, eventually it catches up to you. I keep telling myself, seriously–I say this to myself all the time, I can go to bed right now and fail, or I can “just pull one more all nighter and pass.” Easy choice, of course, you have to pick “just one more all nighter,” you have to pass, but it’s never just one more, and it never gets any better no matter how hard I work. This is no way to live. I don’t think my classes are too hard for me, but I need to be taking less than half as many as I am and my parents do not give me a choice since I have to graduate on time to get them to co-sign my loans. If I could go back and do it again I wouldn’t have taken the loans and just wouldn’t have gone until I could pay for it myself and go at my own pace. This is no way to live. Nothing is worth this.</p>
<p>You asked whether OP was pressuring her, consciously or subconsciously. I wasn’t going to comment on this, but the fact that she said this makes me wonder:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Implying that a kid who obviously needs accommodations would be taking advantage of the situation by accepting accommodations, I think, is absolutely pressuring her and is going to drive her into the ground before she graduates. I hope OP just worded that sentence unfortunately and that is not really what she meant, and I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt because I agree that she obviously cares about her D very much since she took the time to post this message, but if that’s the case her actions by not encouraging her to take the accommodations and BE A KID while she has the chance contradict what she really means, and she needs to think about that before she sends this kid to fail in college. That’s just my two cents, take it or leave it. Need to get back to my homework or I’ll be on my fifth all nighter in the last week.</p>
<p>I am a high school senior with a very similar LD. Verbal IQ is at 99.9%ile. My overall IQ is about 130 however a separate working memory test puts my visual working memory at approximately the 5%ile…not so good. Needless to say, my working memory is atrocious and I’ve had to work very, very hard to overcome these obstacles. I, like your daughter, am a high achiever and have had to put in mega hours into certain courses. I don’t have advice for college, but I do have advice/criticism for how she is treating high school at this point. </p>
<p>The amount of time your daughter is putting into school could literally be defined as clinically obsessive. This absolutely unhealthy and should be nipped in the bud at once. Her schedule needs to be rearranged so that she is placed in courses that emphasize higher level thinking as opposed to simply rote memorization. Foreign languages and history are probably especially difficult for her (I know they are for me). As a result of being identified last year, I now take French I and no history at all. I am learning beautifully and still have a very challenging schedule (5 AP classes). In addition, I have been given extended time which has helped enormously on the essay writing portion of the SAT that requires strong retrieval skills which I lack. As a result my writing SAT score went up 80 points with my essay going up from an 8 to an 11. </p>
<p>Accommodations are not cheating. They level the playing field. They will allow your daughter’s high school and college to see her intellectual abilities rather than her rote memorization skills. I think at this point you should be a lot less worried about college and a lot more worried about how you can save your child from going off the deep-end before she enters college. Happiness is much more important than achievement.</p>
<p>I agree completely with rairerade. FlyingChance, I’m troubled by your view of accommodations as “taking advantage” of an LD. If your D had bad eyesight, would you say she was “taking advantage” of that by wearing prescription eyeglasses? Rairerade is right – accommodations simply level the playing field. </p>
<p>I’m also troubled by the number of hours your D spends on schoolwork. I think you said she spends 18 hours a day on the weekend on homework. Do you mean 18 hours on Saturday and another 18 hours on Sunday? That would mean that if she woke up at 7 AM, she would be working straighten through both days until 1 AM. That is very scary. Even if you meant she works 18 hours total on Saturday and Sunday, that’s still nine hours each day, which is way too much time given how many hours she puts in during the week.</p>
<p>College is going to be really rough for your D if she does not get set up now for accommodations.</p>
<p>My DD was Dx with an LD in middle school, IQ 150, processing 120 approximately.
She was given extra time on timed tests, AP/SAT as well as the knowledge from her HS teachers that sometimes there would not be enough hours in the day to keep up on assignments, rarely did she have to use that class extra time as she compensated well. But DD definitely spent more time actually studying than her friends and sisters, she usually worked all day on Sundays and actually studied all evening, not sat around at her desk sort of studying like her sisters might have 
It was intense, but it was not any 18 hours a day.</p>
<p>DD was a 3 sport athlete as well as having other ECs and was also top 5 at her school. She dealt with all the friends moaning that they could do better with extra time, but really it’s not true…not usually. My other two kids w/o an LD scored the same general % on the SAT as LD-DD did with extra time. It was no advantage, it just allowed her to show her true potential. I figured that if the world is going to judge so much on something as artificial as one test, then DD should take advantage of the opportunity to show her best self. </p>
<p>Some of the admins at her HS asked me why we fought for that extra time, we did it to get her into the best university we could. I don’t know that I actually knew she would no longer get accommodations in university, but now that we know, I am certain that her attending a top school successfully helped make up for her lower than potential MCAT/GPA in applying for med school. Having that extra time on the SAT and final exams turns out to have been more important than we realized it would be!</p>
<p>At BERKELEY (mentioned above as being helpful) we found NO HELP at all. In the OPs case, it might work as her DD is working at IQ80 and DD was working at IQ119. When we spoke with the people at Berkeley, I was surprised at the way they brushed DD off, essentially they said once you are out of HS you must perform at 2 Std dev below average w/o accommodations, not 2 std dev below your potential. I spoke to several people there over more than one occasion and it seemed to me they were really set up mainly for people with physical limitations, not processing issues or ADD, so do ask your schools how they view these issues.</p>
<p>ASK schools if they continue the HS accommodations or go by the federal rules, most publics probably go by the rules.</p>
<p>We ran into the same thing for the MCAT, I even had her testing psychologist review the rules and she confirmed that the rules are silly, but they are that way. DD has completed her UG & is now at Med school. She figured it was time to “man up” and compensate as best she can, as now she’s an adult and their won’t be a lot of accommodations offered in real life. She did receive more B+/A- marks in UG than she would have with extra time on exams, but that’s life. She also had a dismally average MCAT which is probably 20% below her actual intellectual potential, but she got in and that’s what matters. Had she not been admitted I would be more frustrated.</p>
<p>Interestingly, her long time study habits, learned to compensate for her LD, have really proven helpful in med school, she actually finds she studies less than many of the non LD kids who have never been challenged like this before and who are having to learn their limits, their best style, etc.</p>
<p>I must say, I’ve learned a lot about learning disabilities by reading this thread.
(I used to think that unless your disability made your performance “below average,” you wouldn’t be considered disabled.)</p>
<p>In K-12 the guideline is below potential, so if there is a discrepancy between actual & potential performance (those might not be the precise special ed terms) then there is an LD.</p>
<p>I learned a lot going through the process and what I am certain of is that my DD felt DUMB & slow until she was Dxed; then she understood the issue, was given tools to compensate and did so. She had an amazing HS experience & very respectable university one, too. I am positive that would not have happened without the diagnosis and tools and it also required the extra time on the SAT & timed final exams to give her the numbers to allow a top university to consider her. Otherwise, she was bright enough that she would still have looked smart, but “average smart” not amazing student smart ;)</p>
<p>I don’t know much about learning disabilities & colleges. What I am wondering is if the secondary question should be"What type of career path would my child most likely enjoy pursuing and thrive in studying?" Would that then help narrow down the college selection process? Would some highly qualified career counseling help? Or can the specialists who diagnose learning disabilites help with college selection criteria? ( If I am missing the point, please just ingore this post.)</p>
<p>somemom, great posts. I have 2 sons with same diagnoses and there was almost no info at the time to guide us. However, S1 is at a private U that honors his accommodations, allowing him extended time for exams. S2 is in applying to college this year. We had heard Cal was a great place for LD–but no? Guess we need to do some more investigating.</p>
<p>Both my boys do have to work hard (not impossible) extra hours, but both also felt enormously relieved to understand what was up with their brains that allowed them to make analytical and creative connections so rapidly, but compose essays so relatively slowly.</p>
<p>Thx again.</p>
<p>I assumed that reputed liberal-left-hippie-disability friendly-activist Berkeley would be accommodating. I would say we spoke to their office a dozen times both in the summer before she attended and in her freshman year. We never got any different story other than, “must perform at 2 standard deviations below the norm without accommodations” DD was not below the norm, yet still had a 2 std dev difference between potential & performance due to processing issues.</p>
<p>As I recall we did not fight really hard, write letters, take it to the top, etc. We called on many occasions, we talked with more than one person and not with interns, I believe DD went in person. We got a consistent story every time. This was the exact same story that we got from the MCAT people. I had DDs k-12 school psychologist read the rules on the MCAT and she agreed that we read the rules properly and that DD would not qualify under those rules, and that the rules were silly ;)</p>
<p>You might call and ask, maybe it has changed? At least get the info first hand. I do know of anecdotal evidence wherein private schools chose to continue HS level accommodations, so if you had it in HS they would allow you to continue those accommodations.</p>
<p>Need help. My son was diagnosed with Non-Verbal learning disability 9 years ago. He has always had resource classes. He is now a junior with the hopes of going to college. He holds a 3.7 GPA. Unfortunately on his final WAIS or Weschler he scored below average. He has so much determination and wants to succeed. I have inquired at several LD Colleges and you have to be above average, very confusing. Is there a college for him or should I now turn the direction on him…ultimately telling him he can’t go to college. We live in St. Louis area if that helps but are willing to go outside to make this happen. Point being we have a child who wants to be all he can be and because of a test saying his IQ is below. We know college will be a struggle but we are eager to attempt it. Please help with any information good or bad.</p>
<p>It’s hard to know when all you say is below average. That could mean anything from profound mental retardation to an IQ of say 84? </p>
<p>If it were me, I would retest with a psychologist who specializes in testing and accomodations and get his or her insight. They will probably have many resources and his test scores could very well change.</p>
<p>To the OP, I’ve skimmed the posts so I may have missed something but agree with the many posters who say that accommodations merely provide an even playing field. You should get your daughter tested to the extent you haven’t and present this information to colleges to which she is accepted so that she can get extra time. Help her get accommodations in college. </p>
<p>I’ve posted about my son’s experiences before, so you might want to search for longer posts by me. But, my son is like your daughter, gifted with learning disabilities. High verbal IQ, average performance IQ. Severely dyslexic, speech delay, can’t listen and write at the same time, can’t do foreign languages. However, smart enough and creative enough, based upon my experience, that if you told me that in 20 years he’d be on the faculty at Harvard, I wouldn’t be stunned. But, reading was physically painful for him. In 4th grade, it took him an hour to hand copy a paragraph and he had a headache for the rest of the day. This wasn’t just, “It doesn’t work well” but “It hurts. I get headaches. I am exhausted. I get sick.”</p>
<p>He had an IEP starting in 2nd grade. We did partial homeschooling in HS so I could make sure he learned to write at a level commensurate with his thinking.</p>
<p>He did not overload with AP’s but did very well in school and on SATs/ACTs, all with extra time. He works very slowly and has double time on tests and I had to negotiate with the SAT folks but not the ACT folks to get this. He had a few ECs but fewer than he would have without the LDs. They included competing in Moot Court (tough for a dyslexic) and co-authoring a novel but no serious athletic teams. His partial homeschooling enabled him to do things he was interested in that were both course and EC-like activities. But, relative to the top kids at his HS, he was definitely light on ECs. He also applied during a gap year, which gave him a little more time to ramp up EC-like activities (campaigning for Obama in NH, for example). That might be good for your daughter.</p>
<p>We had no idea who would accept him given his odd record and so he applied to 16 schools. The good news: He got into good schools including Ivies and top LACs; he was admitted to 10 and wait-listed at 4, including one of his safeties (he didn’t show love). He did triage and cut down his list to three schools and we visited. He went to admitted students shindigs and we jointly visited the Dean for Disability Services and sent them all of the psychoeducational and neuropsychological reports in advance. At the Ivy, it was clear that getting a waiver of the language requirement (a no-brainer according to our neuropsych) was going to be hard – we said that he couldn’t attend without knowing and so they asked for more data, which we supplied, and then wrote back a very bureaucratic letter saying that they would recommend the waiver assuming that the rules and regulations of the university had not changed and blah blah blah bureaucratese. At the two LACs, they were fabulous. One said, “If we admitted your son, we’re going to do everything we can to make it work.”</p>
<p>Visiting the disabilities office after you are admitted is, in my judgment, critical. If you visit before, they will all give you the same politically correct baloney about being open to all kinds of learners and making all kinds of accommodations available. But, when your daughter is admitted and you show up with the test results and say, “we think she needs X, Y and Z accommodations, will you do it?”, that is when you learn what they will really do.</p>
<p>Second key point: one of our criteria was either open curriculum or distribution/gen ed requirements that were not particularly cumbersome. Given his LD’s he couldn’t go to a school that would require him to take courses with 400 pages of reading per week. </p>
<p>He chose the LAC who said that they were going to make it work. They have been very helpful – they’ve been great. The Dean for Disability Services may not be as knowledgeable about LDs and legal issues, I would say, as some of the other folks we met, but her heart is in the right place. He occasionally gets emails from her or her assistant just making sure he’s doing X.</p>
<p>He is working very hard, but won a prize for academic performance at the end of his freshman year. He’s now near the end of his sophomore year. He got an email this spring from the fellowships office, saying that because of his outstanding academic performance, they wanted to invite him to meetings at which they discussed fellowships (Rhodes, Marshall, Gates, Fulbright, …). [Of course, he didn’t go because he was working hard, but hey, he’ll meet with the person later on]. More to say, but it can work out very well.</p>