<p>Kelowna, are you in a state like Texas, California, or NJ where top 10% is mission critical? And, what grade is your child in? 9th?</p>
<p>^^I have no clue. My issue is that he has only started HS a couple of months ago and he is already faced with something he can’t really comprehend. There is going to be many, many more problems/choices like this one as he goes along.</p>
<p>Nope, the 10% is not critical as far as admission into state schools goes. Ranking will play a role in being admitted to selective schools as well as getting merit money. He is a freshman.</p>
<p>if you want to be on top here in texas you HAVE to game the system! if you don’t go in knowing all the ins and outs of it, you will stumble, for sure. and here it makes a huge difference to lots of kids if they are top 11% instead of top 10.</p>
<p>to max out GPA you have to take some classes online, take as many upper level classes as possible and put off taking a couple on level classes until senior year. this will maximize gpa thru your junior year (which is what schools look at for admissions, mostly).</p>
<p>this year my DD is doing early release just to keep her gpa up where she wants it, even though it is not very convenient. </p>
<p>and there is nothing wrong with anyone going in to the GC and planning out the four years in hopes of val. status. nothing preventing several people from doing the same thing. : / then you just have to have the kid that can make all As all the time (i dont have one of those). : (</p>
<p>We won’t know the kid rank till we get the transcript.
Yes, I am aware that there are some “dumb” courses that top kids take online. At our school I was already shocked that some kids take Fine Arts online (???) and now that PE thing!</p>
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<p>Ditto intensity with a school that does not weight classes. (The risk of a B in an AP course.)</p>
<p>DougBesty: top 10% in California means nothing.</p>
<p>It’s so much less stressful if your child knows what she wants. If you just MUST be val or sal, plotting and planning is essential. If you MUST be in the top 10%, plan very carefully. </p>
<p>But let’s say everyone in your family has always gone to Texas Tech and you want to go to Texas Tech, too…if you are reasonably smart, you can take whatever classes you want, not prep for the SAT, have a fun time in HS and still get into Texas Tech. I’m not picking on Tech. I’m just saying that in most states, MOST of the state Us are pretty easy to get into.</p>
<p>There were super bright kids in Son’s class who were not at the tippy-top of the class. Maybe they didn’t know how to game the system, maybe they didn’t care. BUT, they still ended up at awesome schools. Schools are going to recompute the GPA however they want to - probably leaving out those PE grades, whereever they were earned, maybe taking away all weighting for AP classes. So you only need to play the rank game if your high school’s stated rank is essential in some way</p>
<p>“to max out GPA you have to take some classes online, take as many upper level classes as possible and put off taking a couple on level classes until senior year. this will maximize gpa thru your junior year (which is what schools look at for admissions, mostly)”</p>
<p>@ The question now becomes, How does the GC fairly check the rigorous courseload? </p>
<p>Scenarios:
- Child A maximized upper level classes throughout 11th Grade and takes mostly lower level in Senior year</p>
<ol>
<li>Child B took both upper level and on level classes throughout 11th, but all upper level in Senior Year.</li>
</ol>
<p>In CA, top 4% at your HS (as calculated by the UC system) IS meaningful. This ELC (eligible in the local context) status means (presuming the student doesn’t fall apart senior year) acceptance at A UC campus. Now, for the less competitive, this could just mean acceptance at Merced or Riverside. For the more competitive, the booklet UC sent out to ELC qualifying students shows that 60% of them get accepted at UCLA, 66% at Berkeley (per stats from the most recent admission cycle.)</p>
<p>I have no idea if such “gaming” is going on at our HS. If it was, we’d had advised our S to just ignore it. The only thing that stuck in our craw, since the HS does weight, is that S’s effort to take an on line class in linear algebra (and now multivariable calculus) could NOT be weigted, even though these are by far and away more work that the AP Stats class he gave up for these, which IS weighted.</p>
<p>Rather than getting our knickers in a knot, we are hopeful that keen eyed admissions committees will recognize the rigor shown on his transcript from doing this, and ignore the fact that the result is being rank #4 in a class of 518, rather than a few steps higher.</p>
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<p>Oops. Sorry. I must have misread something I saw a few days ago. </p>
<p>Kelowna, I think you’re on the right track by letting him choose how to take PE. My kid fell out of the top 10% because he took 4 credits of music and 5 credits of FL. His choice, all unweighted. I wouldn’t have changed a thing. He studied stuff he loves and is one of the happiest teens you’ll ever see. May your son be equally content with his decision, whatever that may be. :)</p>
<p>Oh, and once you’ve figured out how to ''game", don’t move. Son’s friend moved to an “easier” HS, but lost some AP weighting because the new school didn’t offer those particular AP classes. She ended up #5 in the class, when she maybe could have been 1 or 2 with the weighting. Of course, the reason not to get her knickers in a knot was that at the college she chose, she would have been admitted if she had been number 100 in the class.</p>
<p>And also, be careful in taking those unweighted classes senior year if your school requires a mid Senior year transcript. A boy we know was “un-invited” from a school’s “big scholarship” competition when his rank slipped from the top 5% to the top 6% mid senior year.</p>
<p>^^top5% vs top6% makes that huge of a difference???
This is not calming me down :(</p>
<p>In the case of the boy to which I was referring, he already had substantial merit aid from the school. The “big (free ride) scholarship” competition was only open to those in the top 5% of their classes. It was maybe the difference between $20,000 a year and $40,000 a year - so yeah, the 1% drop might have cost his parents $80,000. </p>
<p>It is probably merciful that most colleges are not that transparent. Most of the time you don’t know exactly why you were offered the money you were offered. The notices about the “big scholarship” competitions usually speak to inviting the “top” students to compete, so you can’t really pinpoint why you weren’t invited.</p>
<p>In a less dramatic development, my own child got $2000 more a year when his mid-year transcipt showed that he had moved from the top 21% to the top 20%.</p>
<p>If you’re in a large public school, a big enemy of high class rank is student attrition. My son had exactly the same numerical rank at the end of Semester 1 of HS as he did at the end of Semester 6 of HS…but mid freshman year that rank was in the top 16% and early senior year that rank was in the top 21%, because there were fewer students. This is a generalization, but the students who drop out or move around alot are likely to have a lower class rank than your child, rather than a higher.</p>
<p>^^^ That bit my son in the butt as well, but he was at a smaller school, less than 200 in his class. Grades remarkably consistent, but he dropped as kids left.</p>
<p>It’s kind of sad to hear some freshman so excited about just squeaking into the top 10%. I always think (but don’t say), “Keep up the hard work and you’ll graduate in the top 15% of your class!”</p>
<p>Conversely, a few years ago the #2 student in the senior class dropped when a new student arrived. Not sure how most schools do it, but her GPA was accepted at face value and she surged ahead of the former #2. </p>
<p>D bounced around in rankings but there’s no doubt in my mind she took the most rigorous courseload available. Interestingly, she was not sal (as that was determined at the end of 1st semester). But by graduation day she had returned to her #2 spot. Courses at a governor’s school program were reweighted during the first semester and that resulted in a one semester blip benefitting those students who were participating in the program. Unfortunate timing, but that’s the way it is. </p>
<p>Kelowna, don’t get too stressed over the rankings. Your son should pick the courses of the greatest interest to him and do the best he can. D certainly would have been ranked higher had she not pushed herself to take as many AP courses as possible; but intellectually she would have been stifled. Rank is just one part of admissions and scholarships (unless you’re in Texas or California).</p>
<p>kelowna, it is maddening, but don’t put too much energy into it. Knowing what I know now, I’m talking to my freshman about what he wants out of school – gaming the system (taking the easier classes with a less-engaged peer group and less-engaging teachers) or taking the classes that are the best fit for him and letting the chips fall where they may. Or a combination of the two. After he gets his first semester grades, I’ll be curious to see what he decides.</p>
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<p>Last night my 8th grader went on this rant about hating school. She hates it because she hates being graded. She doesn’t understand why grades are necessary. In her mind, the students should be asked to do the work. If they know it, they move on to the next thing. If they don’t, they re-do the paper until it is right. It is really hard to argue in favor of grades, in ther face of a “competency” argument. (Funny that this argument comes from an ex-gymnast, where .05 of a point could separate 1st place and 5th place.)</p>
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<p>Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles does this as well. It looks very sensible.</p>
<p>Kelowna - I’m convinced “The Invisible Hand” made HS this way so parents and students would be able to laugh about that uniquely artificial period in their lives. So relax a little. Very often “Will it make a difference if …” will indeed make some difference. But that difference (in GPA, Class Rank, Award Nominations, etc.) will have very little impact on the student’s life. JMHO of course.</p>
<p>[Note: I thought it was terribly unfair that my D, #6 in her class, was the ONLY student in the top 65 kids to be overlooked for NHS. Three years later it’s a complete non-issue.]</p>