<p>Re post #77 We live in Maine, and my S's class took AP MEH in 10th grade. </p>
<p>I don't say this to put you down, but South Portland isn't exactly the best school district in the state.</p>
<p>Well we're a pretty average public school district. Cuz damn, I wasn't rich enough for no prep school! </p>
<p>But yes, I was pretty fed up with the lack of intellectual culture at my school. But there's nothing wrong with AP history courses in 10th grade. Simply give a sixth grader a computer game like say, Cossacks or Alpha Centauri, for example. I will go so far to say that frequent RTS playing helped tremendously in visualising historical events when writing history essays in AP Exams. The rzeczpospolita, Tartars, grapeshot, pike and shot, strelets, boyars ... the game is just a game, but it's enough to make you interested to read about those entities in depth. And then there's also Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Greco-Bactrians' encounter with the Han Dynasty, the Uyghurs, the Khanate of the Golden Horde....</p>
<p>Enough to make you wide wide aware of the history they don't teach in middle school and high school. :) </p>
<p>The big problem with AP courses is that the teachers don't have imagination. Your peers seem uninspired. And dialogue over anything interesting raised in an essay? Nahhhh. AP may be college-level coursework, but the one thing it lacks is intellectual dialogue. In its place comes rote memorisation. I mean sure, you're writing thousands of words a week, if not tens of thousands, but the Bantu peoples become just another unit to cover. No one squeals in delight at, "OH! We're on the Turks!" </p>
<p>Well, not where I lived anyway.</p>
<p>^^^^Maybe high school in general is just a waste of time?
It has been for me at least, intellectually, not socially.</p>
<p>Our school has 4 levels of classes:</p>
<p>Basic
CP (College Prep)
Honors
AP</p>
<p>Not all classes are offered in each category.</p>
<p>galoisien, you were living in a blue collar town with a HS notable only for its football team. Most people with high educational expectations who live in SP are those who live in the Willard Beach area and send their kids to private school. If you were at either of the Portland schools or any of the surrounding suburban HSs--not Westbrook, that would be more like South Portland--you would have found a peer group of intellectually-oriented students who loved history and were not into rote memorization. No need to venture into the private schools for that. </p>
<p>There are always going to be a few kids like you around, but the chances of a meaningful cluster grow where the parental education level and the expectation level is higher.</p>
<p>D just found out the difference between "Honors" and "AP" classes at her school:</p>
<p>The "Honors" classes give you only an extra .1 for your GPA
The "AP"s give you 1.0 extra.</p>
<p>But it is a pity that it was only last year that I really got to befriend people during the debate season (the SP Debate team -- which was actually myself, a gifted freshman, and a sophomore who was pretty good at debate but had a self-image problem, plus some people who showed up from time to time -- had to often tag along on the bus, because all the tournaments were in the north, e.g. Bangor). Of course, I never got that close enough to start knowing all the details of their socioeconomic background, but I would have loved being among them, I think.</p>
<p>But I also like peers who come from blue-collar family backgrounds ... well, if they are fairly ambitious. I can't stand the economic pretensions of certain rich students sometimes. But at least the girl who thought herself above those of Chinese ethnicity and told me and my sister in elementary school to go back to China (though we were <em>Singaporeans</em>, if not Americans) is going to an overpriced private school with an acceptance rate of 70% hahahaha. Rightly deserved!</p>
<p>I didn't know that there were other people from Maine on here! Haha. A lot of debate tourneys aren't in Bangor.. I'd know, considering I wake up in the wee hours of the morning to go down to Bates or Cape Elizabeth.. etc. </p>
<p>To get back on track of the thread.. up here we have five levels... kind of. We have Levels 1, 2, and 3 (1 is college-prep, 2 is grade-below level work, 3 is special needs/resource room), honors, and AP. Pretty much, you'd take honors courses freshman and sophomore years and AP's junior and senior years. Most history courses are level one, as are the first two years of all languages (and all 4 if it isn't spanish/french). Art, music, etc. are all level one. Honors and AP are weighted the same.. AP is about the same amount of rigor as honors courses here. They are both weighted, while level 1, 2, 3 count for the same.</p>
<p>People don't always show all facets of their personality in grade school, you know.</p>
<p>If it makes you feel any better, kids I knew who were Korean also got the "go back to China" thing from a couple of dimwitted classmates in grade school at Cape.</p>
<p>Anyway, I know plenty of people in Cape Elizabeth, most of whom are fairly well off, and none of them took their kids on several European vacations per year, or anything even faintly approaching that level of indulgence. Of course they do exist, but like true intellectuals, they are in the minority. :)</p>
<p>In any case, you have succeeded in escaping from SP to an excellent school, and the world is your oyster. Good luck!</p>
<p>the school I go is about median size with about 300 kids in each grade. There is a very big difference between college prep and honors and sorry to say this but kids who take college prep as freshmen fail to catch up to honors kids in sophomore, junior, senior years. The gap only gets bigger and bigger and by the time students are seniors, there are almost six levels of math(algebra 2, application math, pre-cal, pre-cal honors, calculus cp, AP Cal AB, AP Cal BC or even multivariable calc).</p>
<p>In my opinion, I think that the biggest difference between an honors course and a college prep course is the pace. In an honors course, you would be covering much more stuff in a faster time and also in much more depth. At our school, honors classes have to address breadth as well as depth. In AP courses, the pace is even faster and depending on the rigor of the ap course, the homework could range anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours a day. And that combined with weekly assessments could be a bit of uhh you know where I'm heading... ;)</p>
<p>i think the whole country should have the same system of grades.</p>
<p>That is hard because education is not a constitutionally federal institution. States' rights, etc.</p>
<p>Not to mention the existence of private schools.</p>
<p>Anyway, at my school, honors and APs recieve the same weighting (not that it matters much in college admission). However, there are generally no duplicate honors and APs (to my knowledge, there is one). For example, our history department doesn't offer any honors. Instead, it offers regular and AP. Generally, AP and honors are of equal difficulty, unless you count the APs that are restricted to senior year as harder than the honors tracks that led to them.</p>
<p>It's not only taking the APs, it's taking the tests and getting the 4 and 5 that make them meaningful. S2 took AP World History in 9th grade, got a B in the class (5 point B, mind you) and by his own admission learned very little. Got a 1 in the test (no wonder). Many schools don't make you take the tests at the end of the year and quite a few students don't because they are afraid it's going to look bad if they don't get a good score. Honors classes don't usually have a standarized test, so it's hard to compare the grades. You have to be careful what you inflate your GPAs into so as not to be surprised if you end up with a large discrepancy between your grades and your SAT/ACT scores.</p>
<p>As near as I can tell my daughters' high school has no systematic naming of "tracks" in terms of college level. It does have AP courses and other courses labeled advanced, some of which are considered prep for the AP courses. However only AP courses are given additional weight in the GPA. There are no honors courses. Math has two "paths" Sequential and Core, both of which are considered college prep, but the fast track on the Sequential is the one with AP calculus and statistics. Accelerated kids start the foreign language and sequential math tracks in eight grade. The best of them then combine Algebra 2 and Trig into a one year course instead of the normal 3 semester course. Remedial courses are not called out as such in the course catalog.</p>
<p>Sixteen AP courses are currently offered. Five of them are foreign language courses, and it is rare for a student to take more than two foreign language courses. The advanced college track students are normally offered the option of their first AP course, US History only unless the student is exceptional, in ninth grade. Limited number of teachers and scheduling conflicts makes it difficult to take more than four AP courses a year in the junior and senior year. As a result it is rare that a student takes more than ten AP courses before graduating, although the middle school student who took advanced physics in seventh grade should exceed that number if he doesn't go to college before his junior year.</p>
<p>My large (3600 students) high school offers about 30 AP courses, and 17 honors courses. Basically, we have honors, regular/CP, and "essentials" for English, math, and science. Foreign language and social studies classes are either AP or regular, though a few languages offer a 3/4H option. Usually only juniors and seniors take APs, so the AP classes replace honors classes at these levels.</p>
<p>I'd say there's a definite difference between the honors and CP levels, but maybe that's just because they've dumbed down everything that's not in the honors track (In the CP Biology class, kids get extra-credit just for turning in homework on time!)</p>
<p>I wonder what % of the schools which have differential point systems for grades in different level courses also claim not to rank their students.</p>
<p>My guess is that it is well over 75%.</p>
<p>Our whole public school system (one of the biggest in the country) just changed to not ranking students last year.</p>
<p>My high school also has a four level track, AP, Honors, CP, and Integrated, with some options missing due to lack of demand. The smart kids start out in all honors and then go to a mix of honors and AP, the average kids start with CP and maybe take an honors course or two, and the kids who are essentially future drop outs take integrated courses, where simple concepts are taught very slowly, and the intent is to get the kids to the point where they can pass the graduation test. The school adds a .025 pt weight for getting a C or higher in an AP course, and the same in some of the more difficult and higher level honors courses. None of our language courses are weighted or considered honors, although some of the classes are a joke. Nearly all of our teachers are white women who aren't even close to being fluent. I am in a class of around 315, and so my schedule is regularly "locked" by having the classes I want only available in one period. You could assume from what I just wrote that my school is pretty bad, but it is ranked within the top public schools in my state. </p>
<p>On another note, I got 5s on both the APUSH exam and the APEH exam, with a great teacher for the first course and a ridiculously bad one for the second. I can understand how having a bad teacher could drop your exam score by a bit, especially if you never did practice questions or essays, but it is ridiculous that a B-student in an AP course could get a 1 on the exam. That must be some serious grade inflation, or a seriously bad teacher.</p>
<p>There are good and valid reasons for a school not to rank its students. My school, I'm told by my GC, used to rank before Ivy adcoms recommended not releasing rank because it hurt the students.</p>