Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:To Professors:
Can you tell which students attended private prep high schools versus those with a public high school background ?
I am familiar with private day & boarding schools throughout the nation and would be shocked if graduates lacked the skills and maturity noted above by several posters.
Not really; not consistently. If I had to draw patterns, I'd say: Private school students tend to have more familiarity with the writing expectations and higher initial skills, but the good public school students are more likely to rapidly improve from feedback. This sometimes results in more growth and more interest which is likely to make them the strongest students. I would say that private school students are more likely to be over-represented in the top quartile of my students, but likely to be slight under-represented in the top 1%. Private school students seem to be more likely to attend office hours and have more composure in that context. They are definitely not, as a group, stronger in intellectual curiosity. If I forced to generalize, I'd say they tend to have less--at least less than the good public students--but the difference isn't noticeable and I could be wrong. The most consequential difference is unsurprising: the private schools students tend not to fall in the "worst" group. So less variability, which makes my job easier.
The private school students who struggle seem tired, set free and/or above it all rather than not capable. My most aggressive, outrageous "grade-grubbing" experiences have happened to have been with private school students, but I don't blame that on their schools rather just a personal sense of entitlement and a belief that everything is negotiable. All students, wherever they went to school, seem to struggle with managing distractions now on their own, and there doesn't seem to be a difference between groups.
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