@homerdog except at our nearby districts where some parents will decide for their child they have to take several AP’s and get A’s to stay competitive so they hire tutors and add tutors for multiple SAT/ACT/Subject tests. Wash, rinse, repeat. And it isn’t always about getting into the highest ranked schools (or for merit as I mentioned before). Many there go on to state schools.
@jcmom716 understood. Kids here are tutored to death. That’s another thing we have not done with our kids. They advocate for themselves and go in early to see teachers almost daily with questions. In some honors and AP science classes, virtually all of the kids have tutors. I’ve discussed this at length with our science chair and the principal since some of these tutors have old quizzes and the teachers haven’t changed the questions in a few years. Our high school went after one of the tutors who would post the quizzes for the parents who paid a fee for access to her website. They were able to get her to take down the site but the kids who tutor with her each week see these quizzes and the school says they can’t do anything else. How about changing the quizzes?!
The teachers say they love that our S19 takes the classes without a tutor. They insist he will get more out of it by figuring everything out on his own. When he’s been able to eek out an A without a tutor, it’s quite a love fest between him and his teacher! It is not easy going though. He missed an A by .1 percent one semester in his honors Chem class and the teacher wouldn’t budge. It was the difference of one question on the final exam. It was very frustrating to see the kids who have a tutor twice a week come away with As.
What are these kids all going to do when no one is holding their hand in college?
They will have tutors in college too.
A friend of mine who tutored for quite good students in high school said that the problem was just their lack of time, for the most part. The time-consuming homework ironically hindered true learning, especially when its time demands were compounded with demanding ECs.
The tutors giving away old quiz answers for a fee–beyond annoying!
Perhaps that indicates that the high school has interpreted “more rigorous” as “more work”, even if the added work does not necessarily help the students learn more or better.
@ucbalumnus that could be true. The workload is the problem after all. In high school, kids have six, seven, sometimes eight classes and if they each give 30-60 minutes of homework it adds up. In college, the students are not in class every day from 7-3 and they have fewer classes. They have more time for the homework. They aren’t taking college level science, history, math, English, and foreign language all at the same time. And they aren’t slammed with ECs every single day. The kids I know who don’t have an intense EC certainly have more time to do homework and sleep. The problem is trying to have downtime with a heavy class load and an EC.
Plus, AP classes are supposed to be college level so the homework matches the homework that would be given in college. I guess our teachers look at it like that. How can you dumb it down?
No one in our house thinks DS is a failure. Switching mindsets and realizing that DS will be happy at Local U and that it won’t take straight A’s to get there was a good thing for all of us and really helped our relationship with our son. al of us were getting caught up in the competitiveness of the school and there was no reason for it since he doesn’t even want to go far away to college.
I’m confused. On one thread a kid is being called out for cheating when she told another kid from a different class what a question that was on a test . And now on this thread kids with tutors who give them entire exams get a free pass? And the school lets this go also? That’s ridiculous.
@gouf78 The tutor who has quizzes has just the quizzes, not the chapter exams. The quizzes are worth a much smaller percent of the grade. Students are allowed to bring their quizzes home so, if a student has an older brother or sister or a older friend who is willing to share, they can also see those quizzes. It’s not a good thing no matter what, but I think it’s a different level when an adult tutor shares those quizzes with kids who don’t have access to them. And the kicker is that parents know and don’t mind since their child will get a good score on the quizzes. It’s all about the grade with some parents…not the learning.
ucbalumnus in #84 has it exactly right, with regard to the local school.
As for matching the homework in college, the college science courses of which I am aware have homework that requires problem solving on paper, which depends on understanding the subject. I am totally in favor of high school homework of that type. Among the college science courses that are known to me, none involves construction projects, Rube Goldberg devices, or group video production. I hope these assignments do not wind up in college science classes in the future.
I know there is a team competition for college engineering students, to build Rube Goldberg devices. Ditto for the concrete canoes and solar vehicles, also in engineering. I hope these are truly extra-curricular, and that they are not used as assignments in engineering courses.
Back when QMP had the Rube Goldberg project with a clear, written expectation of parental involvement, I took a look at Rube Goldberg projects on the web. There was one from Purdue engineering that had involved a team of about a dozen engineering students, who put in 1440 hours combined.
Some of the Purdue Rube Goldberg projects currently on the web are amusing–worth viewing. But they aren’t useful examples for an eighth-grader with construction-challenged parents and nowhere near 1440 hours to work on it.
My kid’s HS has block scheduling. 4 quarters, typically 5 periods a day, but only 3 are core academics. Classes are longer (-80 minutes?). Pace is fast and there is a lot of homework, but you only have to worry about 3 classes at a time. So for example, first & 3rd quarter you might have Pre-Calc, Honors English, and French, plus electives like art, theater, music, etc. 2nd & 4th quarters would be Honors Chem, Honors World History, and another academic elective. A few things met at “zero hour” before school started every quarter – Choir every other day all year at zero hour is what I remember.
There are a few cons to block scheduling, but I think it is one of the reasons my kids had a more sane HS experience.
Agreed! I have one right now applying to colleges. Straight-A student at a difficult school who just takes no time to relax! It’s so funny. He sent me an essay to look over the other night at 3:15 a.m. No pressure has ever been applied to this kid; he applies his own pressure and we try to lighten it.
The last one I was telling to buckle down and stop procrastinating.
This one I am telling to relax, that’s it all going to be all right.
However, many AP courses take a year in high school to cover what a semester course in college would cover.
In theory, a typical 4 credit college course should take 12 hours per week, including both in-class time and homework (in practice, the time per week is often less these days). If a high school AP course covers the same material in a year, it should need only 6 hours per week. Since high school courses tend to have about 4-5 hours per week of in-class time, the homework load per class should be about 1-2 hours per week for workload equivalency between a typical year long high school AP course and the semester long college course that it tries to emulate.
ucbalumnus, great time analysis, but you forgot to factor in the time wasted during the high school class hours. 
In my kids’ high school the pressure is really from the kids who want to be at the top or from their families. The kids that target tippy top schools know that if they don’t there will be another kid from a similar HS that will and will get the slot. I know kids whose parents try to get them to reduce their course load (take some college prep level classes) who feel like they can handle it and get upset that the parents don’t “believe in their ability”.
In our highly ranked HS, the kids that took mostly college prep level classes really did not have overwhelming work loads. For the most part, they went to excellent colleges or to the big State U and are doing fine in life for the most part. The kids that were under pressure went to top colleges and many continued to excel and put pressure on themselves to get the right internship, the right job and the right grad school.
The other issue to me is the vast gulf between the AP/honors level classes and the regular college prep classes. One of mine went back and forth in math and would get As with very little effort in the advanced class, but struggled in the honors level until he learned the level of effort needed there.
Interestingly, our district reported that the number of students applying EA or ED has almost doubled since 2013.
@ucbalumnus I’m going to see if I can bring your analysis to our principal. That makes sense. I’m wondering, though, if it makes sense for all classes. BC Calc is a year course. It covers AB and BC in that year and my understanding is that AB Calc is one semester in college and BC Calc is a second semester. So, maybe in the case of BC Calc at our school, it is the equivalent of one year of college calc. (I know some high schools offer AB one year and BC the next, but our school doesn’t work that way. You either take AB or BC.)
At our school kids who take AB are seniors or kids planning to take no more calculus. For non seniors the two year track is Trig/Calculus A and Calculus BC
Yes, if calculus BC is a one year course including the AB material for students who have just completed precalculus, it should be equivalent in pace to college calculus (i.e. covering a year of college calculus over a year in high school), so it theoretically should have similar workload to a college calculus course (nominally about 12 hours per week including in-class and out-of-class time).
You can check the AP credit charts of your state flagship and other popular colleges and universities to see whether a given AP is considered equivalent to a semester or a year of material. However, be careful in the case of situations where the AP course has non-AP prerequisites where some of the material is learned (e.g. foreign language, where the non-AP year 1 to 3 material is built upon to get to the AP level, so four years of high school foreign language to AP level may be seen as equivalent to one to four semesters of college foreign language).
@ucbalumnus Ok. That makes sense because BC Calc is almost exactly 12 hours a week with five hours in class and about 75-90 min of homework a night! I can tell the difference. It’s definitely faster paced than his other APs and all kids are warned about it before they choose it. There’s very little reviewing homework (no time) and the units just keep plowing along. Two quizzes or a quiz and a test every single week. Unlike most other AP classes at our high school, strict limits are put on who can take the class.
This is just NOT TRUE. If your kid has something different/interesting about them and has the stats to prove they can do the work, top colleges WILL sometimes pick the more interesting kid. Students don’t have to be lemmings, struggling along in the same herd. Break out – do something different. Don’t just do school related activities. Excel at something outside the school environment that appeals to you. Take the time you might have put into that 9th/10th/or 11th AP and study for your standardized tests, as that helps colleges confirm that you can do their work. But then go build or do something that is interesting that you really like.
I learned another thing when I got out into the working world. The college you went to doesn’t define the job you get or how far you go in life. I work at a lot of companies (consulting), and I’ve met literally hundreds of senior managers. Most of them didn’t go to Ivies – honestly, most went to their state Us.