<p>I will be entering one of the "elite" boarding schools, and I was wondering....</p>
<p>What's the difference between the kids who are at the top of their classes, and those who seem to be stuck in the middle? Is it simply their intelligence, or do those kids seem to be more motivated and disciplined? What do these kids do that their peers do not know about? For instance, I was recently talking to a current student, and she told me that all of the "smart kids" went back to their rooms at about 9pm on Saturdays to do work.</p>
<p>Does anyone else have any more examples or advice?</p>
<p>The girl i was talking to was laughing about them, so I guess they’re missing out on something. I know that I am usually at home on Saturday nights (not doing hw but…)</p>
<p>What’s everybody else doing on a Saturday at 9pm at boarding school?</p>
<p>Well I mean since lots of BS have classes till saturday why would you want to work saturday night? Seem like overkill to me but idk, they could have more work than everyone else.</p>
<p>I did all of my work on Saturdays so I could have Sundays free, but a lot of Andover students wouldn’t start work until Sunday afternoon or evening, probably for the reason you gave, although Andover’s “Saturday classes” are both infrequent and not for a full day.</p>
<p>A lot of them were in clubs like the rest of their year, some did varsity sports, and a couple were even recruited by colleges. A decent number of them were willing to stay up rather late working, sacrificing sleep instead of everything else. A few were music prot</p>
<p>Uroogla could probably answer your question better, but from my 2 years of normal highschool the people at the top of my class work hard during the week and make sure to stay on top of everything as the week goes on. Studying on Saturday instead of just hanging out won’t put you at the top of the class.</p>
<p>I simply kept up with the material and did work all of sunday for the last 2 years of my high school…I’m leaving the school at like 11/100…I dropped a lot this yr from laziness and math though.</p>
<p>Was it only the top 10% at Andover that got into the best colleges? Your location thing says Brown, so you must have been among them, or at least close.</p>
<p>OOOOHHH WOW mpicz
I’m assuming that you go to one of the HADES schools or something like it…</p>
<p>I’m going to be a repeating student and I will start in 10th grade. At your school, did they count the work that you did at your former school into the gpa/rank?</p>
<p>That was this year, Im repeating my 10th also, at St. Pauls next year. I’m not at boarding school yet, that’s why I put “normal highschool”. I went to a tough private school last year, but definitely not as hard at boarding school I’m sure.</p>
<p>Andover sent 36% of its class to the Ivies + Stanford + MIT this year, so it’s hardly just the top 10%. But as my numbers at the bottom of this post (<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062977226-post37.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062977226-post37.html</a>) show, it’s certainly not that the top 36% get into these schools, and there are various reasons. Being in the top 10% makes it very likely to happen, but there are other factors than just grades to be considered. I was fortunate enough to be just within the top 10%, but being just outside this would not have affected my college results, either.</p>
<p>The top students had fun too, but it really comes down to either keeping up with the work, learning to write good papers fast, or not doing any work you don’t need to to give yourself more time. You can’t do everything, and there are many intelligent students who focus on community service or sports or music rather than devote their full attention to academics. In the end, how well you do depends on how much time you put into work and how well you can overcome procrastination and learn to study. BSes tend to teach these skills decently well, since one absolutely needs these skills to do well.</p>
<p>Oh yea and I had the same question about GPA and stuff, you should probably e-mail someone at hotchkiss. SPS doesn’t keep rank or gpa (weird grading system)…so I stopped worrying about that. But when applying to college they’ll send out both your transcripts, so colleges will seem your rank/gpa or w.e from your first school.</p>
<p>@ mpicz- oohh. I get it now. I’m in the same situation for Hotchkiss.</p>
<p>@ uroogla- I read (mostly on this site) that the reason why boarding schools get so many of their kids into top colleges is because of hooks like legacy etc.</p>
<p>I really don’t know how much this would affect a college admissions (hopefully a lot since I’m a URM) but…</p>
<p>That’s part of it, certainly. There are so many factors intertwined that it’s hard to pick everything apart and determine the exact cause. Another factor is that upwards of 100 students apply to Harvard, most of whom could do the work, which is uncommon at most public schools. One has to decide what a “hook” is, though. The main difference between me and a friend with similar interests, SATs, and GPA, was clubs and competition results. I had them and so got accepted at some schools the friend did not. On the other hand, one of my friends with similar scores is at Princeton now, probably because he scored in the top 2 dozen students in the exam used to determine the US team at IPhO. I had no such performance on my applications. So hooks don’t have to just be legacy/URM. They can also be academic in nature. After looking at scatterplots of acceptances vs. GPA and SATs, as well as determining the college matriculation records for the top 20% of students, I believe that while legacy, athletics, and URM plays a part in perhaps half of the admissions, a lot of the students have earned their way in without a hook of that sort. Roughly 15% of that 36% comes from the top 20% of students, which makes up a lot of the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton acceptances. Many MIT accepts will have lower GPAs because they’re not going to be penalized as much for not being extremely good writers. The other 21% of students come from outside the top 20%, many being athletes or legacy, but certainly not all of them. The lower you are, the more of a hook you’ll need, though.</p>
<p>Edit: Andover and Exeter don’t explicitly rank, so I’d imagine the rest of HADES works similarly.</p>