<p>I have known that our school system is not great, but after a few months of reading posts here I am beginning to think that it couldn't be any worse. I have a bright sophomore vying for Val and taking the most rigorous course load of any of his peers and certainly the most demanding available. However it is a joke compared to what the average student posting here is taking. First our school doesn't believe in acceleration. The only available options are for honors students to take 9th grade Earth Science and 9th grade Algebra in 8th grade, thus getting one year ahead in math and science. That is it. We only have the option of 6 AP classes. Global and USH are taken in lieu of 10th and 11th grade honors Social Studies. Calc can be taken as a senior if you were accelerated in 8th grade. Bio is new this year but can not be taken in lieu of regular state mandated bio. CS is offered every other year and no one has ever scored above a 3. Lit is offered but you must still complete 3 years of mandated state English. There are no fancy ECs, awards, or competitions. The focus is sports, and that is about the only way anyone ever gets any recognition during school or beyond, but unfortunately my child is not an athlete. So...I am wondering, do top school look at school profiles and immediately dismiss applicants based on a subpar high school?</p>
<p>My daughters graduated from an urban high school where the average ACT score was about 19 and the student population was 65% free and reduced lunch. A few more AP classes than offered at your school, but there was no magnet or GT program.</p>
<p>Neither daughter had any problem with college admissions and both received substantial scholarships to good Midwest universities.</p>
<p>Younger daughter, who is especially acidemically blessed, received the standard “please apply” letters from the big name Eastern schools.</p>
<p>Neither daughter had any problems keeping up with college level work once they moved on to university. In fact, both daughters remarked they were just as prepared for college as other students who went to magnet schools or publics in the wealthy suburbs.</p>
<p>Having said that, though, we are a family to whom academics are important. We encouraged our daughters to take advantage of honors and AP offerings as well as participate in school and community activities that interestd them. Plus both have always been big time readers.</p>
<p>Why would top schools blame a student for the school he attends, which 99% of the time isn’t his choice? Of course they don’t. They “read” the student in the context of the school. If they wanted only kids from New Trier, Short Hills and Exeter, then that’s what they’d do - but they don’t.</p>
<p>Colleges want to see that the students take the most rigorous classes AVAILABLE to them. If the high school only offers 6 AP’s, she should take as many of those as she can. I’m guessing your high school is on the small side too, maybe not, but larger schools can just offer more classes as there are more kids to fill those classes. Your DD needs to make sure she does very well on her SAT/ACT to off-set the lack of offerings in her school. Parents need to be realistic as well. She may be the best student in your school but if her test scores don’t back that up, she won’t be considered for the top schools. </p>
<p>Yes, some high schools are just better than others. I look at our high school compared to one in a neighboring town. Our high school has a full slate of AP and other advanced courses. Kids ranking in the top 25% or so are scoring 30 or higher on the ACT. The neighboring town, the top 10 kids are getting 24-25’s on their ACT’s. A lot of that has to do with exposure to the material on the tests, some of it has to do with kids pushing each other to excel.</p>
<p>I think your high school has some effect on admissions, but not that much. Keep in mind that the top 20 colleges have single digit admissions rates too----that is more of a concern then your course offerings at your high school. Just make sure she has a well balanced list of schools that has a couple reaches, a couple matches and a couple safety schools that she loves.</p>
<p>^ If you have any tips, post them.</p>
<p>OP, don’t worry too much about it. Like someone else said, it’s in the context of HS that your student will be “judged” in admission process. Of course, with an unchallenged curriculum, it would be harder to score high on SAT, for example. But, your student can supplement it with reading or taking some free courses through a number of colleges, like Coursera or the MIT open course program. Also, college confidential is rather an aberration than the norm of HS students/parents. Take it with a grant of salt. I’ve learned a few things over the year and discarded tons more.</p>
<p>Yours can’t be the worst - ours doesn’t offer AP having dropped them when very few could manage a 3 much less better on the tests. Now they offer College in the High School courses - community college courses where the teacher decides if the student gets credit. The course, itself, hasn’t changed much. Our school also requires ALL students to spend 2 years doing Alg 1… it wastes the time of talented students, but why have classes for them?</p>
<p>Kids from our school DO have trouble getting into top schools but some get in. Those who do well in admissions do a bit outside of school to augment their education (I’m not talking just extra curriculars, but actual academics). For those who rest on our classes alone, scores aren’t good - the foundation just isn’t there - so even if the student is talented, they don’t have the material needed to be at the top in scores. Top kids score around 1800/28. If these kids had better academics along the way (not just high school), they’d be right with other top students, but they aren’t.</p>
<p>How do I know? My kids are in the district. My two oldest I pulled to homeschool at 9th and 7th respectively. Both scored in top ranges on their tests. Their academic peers did not. They’ll both admit they weren’t necessarily smarter than their peers and were shocked at the differences in scores. We just used more rigorous materials… appropriate to their ability. Neither regret homeschooling and both are doing well in college (multiple acceptances and merit awards).</p>
<p>Youngest was homeschooled from 5th to 8th, then chose to return to public school for high school. He’s as intelligent as his brothers, but refuses to do extra work outside of school. His GPA is decent > 4.0. His scores as a junior? 26/1810 - among the top scores in his class.</p>
<p>I find it incredibly frustrating. I wish we lived in an area with decent schools, but we have a business and farm here - so - I’ll just be glad in a year and a half when we’re done with the public school. AND, we’re having to adjust our college search to a whole different (lower) level for youngest. That, alone, is a shame as my middle son assures me youngest is equally as smart - if not smarter - than his peers at a Top 30 college. It just doesn’t show and he wouldn’t be prepared well even if he were to get in. He doesn’t have the same foundation (math/English/science, etc). He does have some of those College in the High School credits though…</p>
<p>My daughter who is a freshman in an honors program was just saying this week how the HS backgrounds of her friends in the honors program were so varied. Some kids came in with just one AP (all their HS offered) and one kid came in with 80 credits of IB (from a school where everybody graduates with 2 full years of college classes) and there is everything in between. So, colleges do look at your school profile and make sure you are at the top of what your school has to offer and do not penalize you for your school not offering particular classes. One thing that is not varied is that all these kids had strong test scores (all are either commended or finalists for national merit and I am betting their SAT/ACT scores are high).</p>
<p>I just reported the ErinMiller post, which is advertising, not allowed.</p>
<p>Your high school sounds like ours. It can be an advantage, because colleges are actually very interested in students from schools that don’t normally send kids to them. Our 3 kids did fine with admissions. </p>
<p>I am a little concerned that you are thinking about whether or not your current sophomore will be “Val.” It’s a bit early, and I guess some people value these things and others don’t, so just my two cents. </p>
<p>In our experience, being #1 or #3 or #5 in a class didn’t really make any difference with acceptances.</p>
<p>We have 3 APs, our pass rate is 0 (really…!), and we have no school profile. S1 graduated '07 and I pushed really hard for a School Profile but the GC said “they were a waste”. I spent too many years batting my head against a brick wall when S1 and S2 were there. The standards are mediocre and too many of the teachers and parents just don’t care. Our average CR/M is 950.</p>
<p>Just found out we are moving toward eliminating AP in favor of dual credit community college…in a state where it is very difficult to transfer from cc to a 4 year school. These credits are virtually meaningless.</p>
<p>We do such a disservice to our top students. Few students are prepared for college.</p>
<p>D is a sophomore. I cannot wait for graduation!!</p>
<p>On a positive note for OP, S1 did very well in admissions, SCEA to a HYP and 3 other T20 schools. He did have excellent test scores. I do somewhat believe ad comms view things in context of the HS. The problem is that the students are on very unequal footing one they get there.</p>
<p>Sigh. No, your high school’s is not the worst by far. And, yes, those who truly excell in such high schools can get into the top schools. Many of the most selective colleges are not giving a whole lot of weight to lots of AP courses, anyways. Many say 4 is the about what they consider a good AP load and don’t really count beyond that, especially if there is the calculus and English in there. Bio and the histories are good too. </p>
<p>What could be an issue is the high school’s track record in AP scores. If most kids who take the APs do not do well, that someone is taking APs senior year does not mean that s/he is likely to do well on the exam. Where top schools get some get consideration as a rigorous curriculum issue is that the kids who come from such schools are pretty well known to have a high probability of being well prepared. That can be an issue of concern about students applying from schools off the beaten track.</p>
<p>It would be valuable for said student to do a competitive summer program or other academic endeavor on his/her own that shows how well s/he does compared to others in the country. Doing well on the SAT2 subject tests would be good indicators too. Those schools that ask for those scores do take them heavily into consideration, right along with teh SAT1s. Many of such colleges use 5 part test score, not 3, and kids who did not do well on the SAT2s are flagged right there.</p>
<p>i would demand a description of the high school -the descriptions of how low the graduation rate is very significant to help the admissions to selective schools.</p>
<p>^I would think that the fact that the GC couldn’t be bothered to put together a school profile would be very telling in itself about that school.</p>
<p>sryrstress–how on EARTH can a school get away with that, WOW :eek:</p>
<p>Three years ago, I spoke again regarding a school profile with our then-new principal. He didn’t know what one was…</p>
<p>I was fairly obsessed with college admissions during S1’s HS years. Every ad comm I spoke with insisted they wanted one and it was useful. I am confident none of them knew our HS from any other.</p>
<p>I gave up and wrote a school profile from our state’s DOE site info on our school and our handbook. It’s not rocket science 
We included it with the aps and I don’t feel the least bit bad about doing that. Depending on where D applies, I may be doing it again :)</p>
<p>I agree Steve- D actually used the profile in one of the applications to explain the class offerings and that she took them all and then went to summer programs. Not sure if it helped but the point was the remoteness of the area and using all available here. Now it may not be a valid point with the online classes offered in just the last few years.</p>
<p>Hi Steve. Yes, our school’s profile was so incomplete, outdated, and wrong that DS and DD had to rewrite much of it and add the info in supplemental page with their apps. Admins didn’t want to spend the time to correct it.</p>
<p>Planner: My kids took online AP courses when their school didn’t offer them. Their school also did not allow kids to accelerate much; they believe in one size fits all education. Their school also had few clubs. DS and DD started their own (very successfully cause parents coached and funded it on our own so school didn’t have to do anything) or found mentors and coaches outside of the school for their EC interests. They had to prep themselves (with review books) for all standardized tests; school did nothing. Both got into highly selective schools; I think it helped that they achieved a lot academically and in ECs with almost no resources handed to them.</p>
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<p>And the claim that “90% of students do NOT get accepted into any of their top 3 college choices” is false anyway.</p>
<p>In any case, the OP’s high school with “only” 6 AP courses probably isn’t the worst. It is just that the forum demographic is skewed toward students and parents of students in elite public and private high schools, aiming at highly selective colleges and universities, although a few students from worse high schools sometimes appear (e.g. one who described calculus AB as a double period course, but most students did poorly on the AP test anyway).</p>
<p>According to <a href=“http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/public/pdf/ap/rtn/Ap-Report-to-the-Nation-Appendix_C.xls[/url]”>http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/public/pdf/ap/rtn/Ap-Report-to-the-Nation-Appendix_C.xls</a> , in the US, 903,630 students took 2,720,084 AP exams in 2011, or an average of 3.01 per student taking AP exams, so the students taking 10+ AP exams are outliers (and also note that relatively few AP exams, such as the calculus ones, are well accepted for subject credit and placement in college).</p>
<p>What matters more from the OP’s presumed perspective of college preparation is whether students who graduate from the high school go to college, and how well they do in college. I.e. if students going to college do well in their desired majors and graduate, that is good, but if the students going to college typically need remedial courses, flunk out, or change their majors to whatever the “gut” majors are at each college in order to graduate, that is a bad sign.</p>
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<p>Now that is awful. This is normally what high schools offer to the weakest-in-math students, usually those not bound for four-year colleges. Doesn’t this guarantee that all students will be behind in math in college, since they will not be able to complete trigonometry and precalculus in high school and will need to take trigonometry and precalculus as a remedial course if they major in something that requires calculus (any science, engineering, economics, business)?</p>
<p>You need to take what you see here with a grain of salt. Your high school sounds like mine. 50% free/reduced lunch (but the middle school is a t 62%, so it’s rising). Haven’t heard anybody else here mention gang activity (not a lot), the school cop, or sweeps with the drug sniffing dog. We’ve got that, too. But no metal detectors. Our school is urban, but no inner city. A good-sized majority of the kids will graduate, and in the last couple of years I’ve known kids who’ve gone to Columbia, Cornell, u Chicago, grinnell, Carlton, Dartmouth, northwestern, etc.</p>
<p>We’ve got 8AP classes, but one is studio art. District favors DE, which are accepted at the state universities. State department of Ed prohibits a school form offering both AP and DE, and DE is more beneficial to most students. A handful of classes are weighted. Anything honors is not. The astronomical GPAs posted here just aren’t possible in our district. </p>
<p>CC is full of people who have access to private schools and the money to pay for it. You can’t compare experiences.</p>
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That’s simply not true. Most of the colleges in this country accept 75% of the students who apply. It is a very small percentage of the students who are applying to the colleges with less than a 10% admissions rate. </p>
<p>As to the OP, your high school is not the worst in the country, nor the best. Our high school is able to offer so many AP courses because it has over 3000 students, even so there are often conflicts and at times my kids were not able to take honors or AP courses they qualified for because of scheduling conflicts. Luckily students are judged within their context. If your school offers 6 APs and your kid takes all six, you know he’s taken the most advanced schedule possible. (Though I’ll admit some students may take even more advanced course at local colleges or online.) At our school, even thought 22 APs were offered, I don’t think any student took more than 10. Applicants aren’t automatically rejected for coming from an inferior high school, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take some steps to make sure that your kid has the background to succeed in a selective college. It’s hard to play catchup as a freshman - I watched my sister-in-law totally bomb it as a freshman. (She took time off, and college courses elsewhere then returned to Harvard far better prepared, both intellectually and emotionally.) This may mean doing some academics in the summer, or it may just mean doing enough pleasure reading outside school that you learn to read fast and well. Both my kids had sky high scores on the CR section of the SAT, much higher than any of their friends, all from reading ridiculous amounts of sci fi and fantasy.</p>
<p>You do realize AP classes are accelerated? And the worst high school in the country would not even offer AP classes…</p>
<p>This is why the SAT/ACT/ST/AP exists. A 2000 SAT from a student at a drop-out factory equals the same as a 2000 from a student at an elite prep school. </p>
<p>I’ve also been in trouble due to school issues (Transferred from one grade-deflated international one that does not have honors courses (Kids there with 2.0~3.0 tend to have a pretty good shot at most US unis) to another where there is crazy grade and weight inflation(I know a girl here with a 5.1 who can’t even break the 1900 barrier on the SAT, and another with a 4.8 who failed her AP Physics B exam and got 3s on several others) so my rank was pretty much eviscerated), but in the end, I still managed to get accepted to several excellent schools such as Georgia Tech and UNC.</p>