I dislike all the generalities on this website, as usual. I think parents should really know their student and make the best decision for their student. To say no more than 6 APs, for example, is a rule that cannot be justified across the board. For my D, she would have been bored to death and not competitive for admissions and merit (Texas high school). My D took 15 APs in high school, 1 IB class, 3 dual enrollment courses at CC, including Calc 3 and differential equations, worked at least 10 hours per week every year, was involved in numerous ECs (including a sport and 2 instruments), volunteered, protested this or other social cause, had time for hanging out with family and friends, reading, and spent a lot of time on social media. She didnât take these classes to the exclusion of other classes. She took art, was in orchestra, and had a study hall one year. She dropped them only when she burned out on them naturally after 8+ years). Was she stressed? Maybe on occasion, usually due to procrastination, but not most of the time. Did she care what others were doing? No. She knew maybe the rank of 5 kids in a class of almost 1600 and knew 2 or 3 SAT scores. So I didnât know either. And shr didnât like the kids that were obsessed with grades/school. She was wildly successful with college admissions and merit scholarships.
High school prepared her extremely well for college. As a college freshman, sheâs taking 19 credits (and doing great without breaking a sweat), is heavily involved in ECs, goes to multiple athletic events every week, hangs out with friends, reads, still spends too much time on social media, and still has more down time than she likes and wants to pick up a job next semester while taking the same number of credits. She does best when sheâs very busy. And she is getting adequate sleep.
Would I recommend her path for every student? Absolutely not. But for the some, holding them back with artificial limits isnât beneficial. I made her turn down 1 school that wanted to limit her because sheâs a âfreshman.â
Just know your kid and help them make the right decision for them and donât worry about what others are doing.
But honestly, my son met the number of credit hours to graduate last year, and could drop all but gym and English and still graduate. Or get Fs in all but gym and English and graduate.
@VickiSoCal - Our school has eight classes per year - this is specifically designed so that they can push more AP classes onto kids. So imagine your 6 core subjects and add two APâs on instead of art or another elective that might be enjoyable. Thatâs stress.
It really varies from place to place. I agree with itsgettingreal17 about disliking generalities. The observation âstressâ may be fairly general, but the specific causes are not; so the solutions are not general, either.
The quality of community colleges is highly variable from state to state. In some states, they are quite good, and they permit an easy transition to a university. In other states (e.g., ours) students who come from community colleges experience difficulties (on the average) with the shift in the difficulty of the courses. This is true at least in STEM subjects. I know that other states have quite good community colleges. There is also a variation in the type of students who go to the community colleges in different states. In our state, a student who aced all of the tests in high school (but wound up with a 2.7 UW GPA because of not doing the time-consuming homework projects) would have a hard time finding intellectual peers in a community college. Not true everywhere, I know.
Lots of talk about AP classes and homework but what about ECâs?
My D was in band and the schedule was more than ridiculous. Class, afternoons, nights, weekends. Her quitting was a blessing to the whole family. Finally we could have dinner together which was more important in the long run. The stress level went way down. And she found things of even more interest.
Same with swim teams, soccer, football. It seems all sports have morphed from EC to wanting to be professional. The stress it puts on entire families to travel and schedule every weekend around a school event (rather than a family event) is not reasonable in my opinion. A lot of people say âthatâs just what we doâJohnny/Jennie loves it!â but maybe less than you think. Being over scheduled even for fun stuff is stressful. In my opinion some kids donât have enough down time to even consider what they would do if left to their own devices.
I keep reading posts on CC of kids afraid to quit an EC because they want to do something else or just take a break but worried some admissions guy will turn them down because they didnât âfollow throughâ or some such nonsense.
@Dad2020 Very impressive course list. Calc Freshman year and then AP Calc BC sophomore year is definitely ahead of the curve. I am sorry to say my school district is pale in comparison. The slight danger is not having a math class during the two years prior to college. Hopefully the retention is there.
I think this HS rigor fetish is extremely bad in the long run. It produces computational robots ⊠when HS should be time for learning fundamentals and getting a âfeelâ for problem solving (being creative). Almost every time I look at D18âs homework I get ticked. In BC I see pointlessly difficult problems (e.g. multiple chained integration by parts, multiple levels of trig identity substitutions, etc.). Itâs ridiculous. We didnât have that level of difficulty in my Engineering Calculus classes in college! Totally inappropriate for HS kids, imho.
D18 will finish HS with 8 AP classes, almost all STEM (Bio, Chem, AB, BC, CS-P, Lit, Physics C, Psych). You know what class was the best in HS, imho? Her Biotech classes. None were AP. Sheâs in Directed Study III this year for it and has learned a ton about being on a team, going to a international competition, doing presentations, talking with college students and professors, solving real problems, etc. That experience will be far more useful to her in the future than memorizing obscure trig identities (which she would look up in a book anyway).
I want a creative kid, not a number crunching robot!
@gouf78, it was a happy day for me when D2 quit her school team sport at the end of 9th grade and took up an individual club sport outside of school that was SO much more flexible in terms of the commitment for practice and competition. It was entirely up to the student when to attend. As long as they worked hard while in practice, the coach (who literally was also coaching a US Olympic team to a medal at the time) was fine with whatever level they wanted to participate. I didnât put any pressure on her, either, I just wanted her to do something for regular exercise. My kid ended up with a top 5 finish senior year in the state in sport with about 10% of the stress of the school team sport, too.
I wonder if this has anything to do with high school rankings. Part of that formula involves how many APs are offered. We arenât even going to have our kids use most of their APs for credit in college. The only AP that S19 MIGHT use is AP French to either test out of foreign language or move him up for placement. I know plenty of nightmare stories about kids using math and science APs to place out of college classes and that ends in very poor freshman college grades.
I really wish our school still offered honors and AP for most subjects through senior year. Almost all honors levels are gone by junior year and we are left with standard or AP options. If we had honors classes, the teachers would be more in charge of the curriculum and they could engage the kids at a higher level without the stress of hitting all of the concepts on an AP exam.
@dad2020 âThe pre- calculus is with Algebra 2 before the Trig/Calc A.â
So the most advanced students in our system take this sequence:
6th grade: pre-algebra
7th grade: Algebra
8th grade: Geometry
9th grade: Algebra II / Trig
10th grade: Pre-calculus
11th grade: BC Calculus
12th grade: Multivariable Calc (Called âMath Topicsâ)
Is your school one year more advanced? Are they teaching Algebra in 6th grade? I am asking primarily because I havenât seen that before except on a case by case basis.
@dad2020 âShe always maintained a lack of STEM interest since junior high and did not take any PLTW classes then as many of her classmates did.â
I am not sure what PLTW is? I donât think we have that in our school.
@dad2020 âHer science interest has gone up in high school while math has gone down. Things could changed but I would bet against it.â
Both of my girls are more interested in science and computers than math. They are in college now. One is a computer science major (in engineering) and the other is a material science engineering major. They both have a lot of science, and neither one is interested in math for the purpose of doing math, but math is a critical tool that both of them need to be be able to do a lot of the science.
Certainly every student is different. For example, if she is interested in pre-med, for example, then math would matter a lot less. However, if she is interested in chemistry, physics, astronomy, engineering, computer science etc., then she wonât get far without having strong math tools.
Academically, D1 was primarily targeting top 10 schools since 8th grade. (Story for another thread). She is also a good athlete (recruited DIII).
One thing we did to support her in managing classes and ECâs and sports was to plan 4 years out like @dad2020 did, and then we helped her develop a plan to take the absolute minimum number of classes and still meet all of the requirements to graduate. Within the required courses though, she took the most rigorous course possible.
Our school frowns on this, but it was effective for her and helped her manage a very demanding schedule.
However, it is also a waste of time and tuition to repeat what one already knows well. Better to be able to use the expensive college schedule space to take some other courses of interest either now or later. Lots of students who earn 5 on AP calculus BC are fully ready for multivariable calculus in college, for example.
When the college allows advanced placement for a studentâs AP score, the student may want to try the old final exams of the collegeâs course that can be skipped. That will allow the student to make a more informed placement decision, as s/he will know better if s/he is ready to go on to the more advanced course, needs to review a few things, or should really retake the course.
Colleges often have their own placement procedures for foreign language courses, since many students enter college with some knowledge that is more advanced than the beginner course, but may not have AP, SAT subject, or other external test scores that allow them to show what level they are at in a standardized way. Examples include many students who completed level 3 or 4 in high school (but no AP test) or who are heritage speakers.
@ucbalumnus That is a terrific suggestion to try old final exams from the college if possible. I wonder if thatâs something thatâs typically available to students. Maybe more likely at LACs.
Sometimes, instructors or departments will maintain course home pages. The previous semester ones may have the exams on them. Sometimes, departments or student organizations (with full knowledge of departments and instructors) will maintain publicly accessible test banks.
If you cannot find publicly accessible old exams, you or the student may want to ask the department directly, explaining that the purpose is to determine how well s/he knows the material in the course from the collegeâs viewpoint in order to decide whether to take the advanced placement from AP credit.
@homerdog âI wonder if this has anything to do with high school rankings. Part of that formula involves how many APs are offered.â
Yes 100% - our HS recently fell below the other HS in our district in the state rankings and this is a huge deal for our school. I think itâs why they offer so many APâs and push to hard for kids to take them.
My future DIL teaches college level European history in a private HS.
She started with seniors only, then juniors and now just this year she has a freshmen class. And itâs sort of scary.
She said âI actually had a kid CRY today (to her horror)âŠthey said do we really have to write all these essays (etc).?â Too much work.
And her answer was yesâthis is a COLLEGE level class and my job is to teach the subject.
Sheâs tough (but super sweet too)âshe wants the kids to pass the final exam but sheâs worried about it. Itâs a LOT of pressure for younger kids.
But she canât back down. Seniors were easyâsophomores and juniors okay but freshmen maybe donât have the inner resources.
But they DID sign up for a COLLEGE level class as freshmen which may count for college credit.
She wonât back down on the workâor they canât pass the final testâand that reflects on her also.
Another of her concerns is that her school has taken days off for storms to be made up at the end of the year.
But she doesnât get those make-up daysâthe exams are given nationally. Sheâs lost over a week in teaching time in her book and now is even more pressured to make it up.
@gouf78 I hear you. I guess part of this is that parents need to be very clear on what their kids are getting into. When choosing classes with the GC, the GC should be able to give a very specific info on whatâs expected in these classes and the parents and students need to be self aware enough to know if the class will be a good fit.