@swimmingdad “What I have just read on the last few pages is a few whack job parents who ARE the problem.”
Lol.
I have learned that most parents think that they have achieved the best balance for their kids, and so from that perspective, the definition of “Whack job parents” is any parents who do/expect more than they do. Conversely, most people’s definition of “Lazy parents” is any parents who do/expect less than they do. 
Our AP science classes have tests that closely resemble college curves. The last AP Physics test had a median test score of 59 percent. The exams test being able to use the concepts in different ways than the kids have already done in class and in homework. They have to know how to apply what they’ve learned in new ways. Parents complain like crazy but most kids can pull out a B for the class which would be a 70 percent for the semester. Only a handful of kids get an A with an 80 percent. Again, when I see high school kids on here with a 97 grade point average, I know their school must inflate grades. No one has grades like that in honors and AP classes at our school. It’s not set up like that.
ps. We aren’t in Naperville @MaterS
Only an extremely small portion of HS students take large numbers of AP classes. . According to the CollegeBoard survey, only ~6% of HS students take more than 4 AP exams. Only ~2% take more than 6. The portion of students taking 10+ is negligible. I’m sure the reasons for taking large numbers and related academic stress vary. Perception that more APs = better for college admission is one factor, but is far the only one.
This doesn’t mean the remaining 98+% of the HS population taking more reasonable number of AP classes doesn’t have academic stress. For example, the first study I found in a Google search at https://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/center-for-adolescent-health/_includes/_pre-redesign/Teen_Stress_Guide.pdf found that 78% of low-income Baltimore 14-15 year olds said they were stressed about schoolwork. Other surveys I’ve seen also report high levels of stress, across all SES backgrounds. You described a situation in which teachers, students, and presumably parents are conflicting with each other over undesired student academic behavior, which I’d expect to be stressful for students, even if they aren’t meeting expectations well.
My reply was to @Data10
Naperville North was mentioned in the first sentence of the article linked by the OP.
@maters. Ah. I know. I’ve just said earlier that our kids are in one of the districts in the article and I wanted to be clear that we aren’t in Naperville in case readers want to put your info and my info together. Two different school districts. Both in the article.
It doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other. Yes, if your district offers AP/IB/… classes, you need to take some such classes and have a rigorous and challenging schedule; but that doesn’t mean you have to take as many of such classes as possible, or colleges will only admit the kids with the most AP classes.
I expect you are overestimating how much elite colleges value having a “tiny bit higher GPA” than another applicant from your HS or taking slightly more AP classes than another applicant from your HS. For example, according to FERPA requests for admissions files, Stanford reviewers rate applicants on a scale of 1 to 5 in six categories – tests, high school record, support (includes LORs), non-academic, intellectual vitality + self-presentation, and overall impression. High school record is certainly important, and it’s great to get the max rating in that category, but there are a lot of other important factors in the decision as well. Awhile back I analyzed the Stanford decisions thread for posters on this site. Decisions generally didn’t follow slight differences in stats. There was actually a slight negative correlation with all academic stats, a significant one for class rank… that is lower class rank posters were significantly more likely to be accepted than posters who took the max AP classes in an effort to become valedictorian under weighted HS ranking systems. Instead decisions for this group of CC posters could be predicted fairly well by just looking at out of classroom activities. I expect this relationship relates to the unique population of CC posters being full of students who excel academically, but have far more variable out of classroom activities. Of course this is an oversimplification, and HYPSM… type colleges consider the full application in a holistic sense.
Just a bit of a side note to the discussion of AP. My daughters high school district is the biggest in Illinois. The district to the east of us is the second biggest. AP and honors which are classes ending in 9 and 8 are weighted the same. The one to the east give a higher weighting to AP than honors. Honors gets a higher weighting than a regular class.
@TiggerDad – is it possible to “Like” a post 1000 times??? Much of the K-12 mess today is due to the Japanese Scare in the 1980s. Remember when they were on the march, buying up America? Our people were too “dumb” to respond? The recommended solution was to massively increase the rigor in schools – to become like them. I think it crushes creativity (what happens when you get burned out).
For some reason the “Edit” didn’t work on my previous post so I’ll include it here:
I explicitly told my D18 back in 9th grade that I wanted her to “keep her powder dry”, to not get burned out in HS. As I mentioned on CC before, we went through the HS class list and laid out a schedule of classes for 10-12th grades. We had classes for all of her interests: Photography, Forensics, Science, and I wanted some Art in there. She took that list to her GC (thankfully, I wasn’t with her, just DW) and the GC replied, “oh, you won’t get into a good college with that list”. Out went the interesting classes and in came more AP classes.
In NJ you must take gym all 4 years of HS. It’s 4-5 days a week (will pull you one day a week for lab if you are in an honors science). There goes one class period every year. Also required–a year of an art (visual or performing will work), a year of “career education” (can be anything from engineering to accounting to child care to culinary arts) and a semester of personal financial literacy. Kids graduate well rounded and it would be impossible to take the number of APs some people here are talking about. (They also theoretically understand what a mortgage is and what interest means on student loans!) The result is our school offers some great electives but no one has time to take them. It does take the pressure off loading up on APs, though. Some kids skip lunch to get an extra class in. The school does not recommend it but does allow it.
It is common in our area to take summer school . It used to be if you failed something you would do that. Now most summer schoolers are kids taking those “career education” and driver ed graduation requirements. Gym is a requirement for four years at our school too. There is a way of working around that. I believe skipping lunch is a possibility too. The thing is our area and my guess others also that kids graduate with more credits than they actually need.
@dad2020 “The thing is our area and my guess others also that kids graduate with more credits than they actually need.”
That seems to be driven by people who parents or GC’s that do not understand what colleges want.
Our d1 took the absolute minimum number of credits in high school to graduate. She kept getting notices from the school until graduation that if she failed or dropped even one course, she would not graduate. Colleges do not care about how many courses you take.
However, it is common that the requirements for high school graduation are fewer than the requirements to gain admission to the least selective state university, and the latter are fewer than what is needed to be competitive for admission to the state flagship or other more selective universities.
The problem discussed here seems to be that the perception of what is needed to be competitive for more selective universities gets distorted. People believing that their 8th grade kid “needs” to take a summer precalculus course to be competitive indicates the level of distortion that exists.
My daughter’s school doesn’t allow skipping regular calc and AB before taking BC, unless a student bring’s outside certification. They said it’s Pennsylvania state policy. So her math progress during the 4 years is Trig -> Calc -> AB -> BC. She enjoys the courses and learns well with not much pressure. I am very happy with that arrangement. I believe she will have a more solid Calc foundation that way. She thought about taking a Summer Calc to skip AB, but figured that it would be easier to take a Summer Stat class instead to avoid doubling up Math.
Her school also offers Micro and Macro Econ for one year each, unlike some schools that compacts them into semester courses. There seem to be plenty of stuffs to learn in those econ classes to spend a whole year, especially some not on test but useful stuffs like start-up business cost analysis project and etc.
And that’s how those AP courses are designed right?
“Some kids skip lunch to get an extra class in. The school does not recommend it but does allow it.”
That in high school should be a crime.
AP Calc was designed to cover college Calc I and BC Calc to cover college Calc 1 and 2. Both AP econ courses are supposed to be 1 semester each. My D would have been extremely frustrated with the math and econ progression at your school.
That seems like an extremely slow pace of calculus for students who are good enough in math to be three grade levels ahead in math in 9th grade.
When I was in high school, such a (rare) student would have taken BC immediately after trigonometry / precalculus and earned an easy A in the course and an easy 5 on the AP test.