HB Woodlawn provides unfair advantage to students for college since no intensified classes

[Anonymous]

No pressure to take intensified classes since there aren’t any at HB and therefore kids will always be in the most rigorous classes for purposes of colleges until they take AP their junior or senior year. This does not seem fair.

[Anonymous]

Hmm. Interesting way to think about it. As an HB parent I've been wishing that my kid *could* take intensified classes because she would benefit from more of a challenge. I signed my other kid up for intensified right away.

[Anonymous]

This also provides a mental health advantage, and a good transition period to develop good study and work habits before going all in on AP.

[Anonymous]

I heard the HB kids were trying to vote to eliminate AP classes too. Maybe they just don't want harder classes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No pressure to take intensified classes since there aren’t any at HB and therefore kids will always be in the most rigorous classes for purposes of colleges until they take AP their junior or senior year. This does not seem fair.

As a parent of an HB senior and another kid not at HB... I don't think the HB kids have an advantage w/ college admission. The course selection at HB is not as good as at the comprehensive high schools and many of the AP classes are co-hosted with a non-AP classes and students. I have not been impressed with the "intensified" classes that my other kid is taking. They seem pretty much on par w/ what my HB kid took.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No pressure to take intensified classes since there aren’t any at HB and therefore kids will always be in the most rigorous classes for purposes of colleges until they take AP their junior or senior year. This does not seem fair.

What is the unfair advantage? Being less challenged before going on to college?

I don't know who the H-B hater is on this board but you need to find a productive hobby. This one is pretty sad.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No pressure to take intensified classes since there aren’t any at HB and therefore kids will always be in the most rigorous classes for purposes of colleges until they take AP their junior or senior year. This does not seem fair.

What is the unfair advantage? Being less challenged before going on to college?

I don't know who the H-B hater is on this board but you need to find a productive hobby. This one is pretty sad.

Don’t be coy. The counselors will mark their transcript “most rigorous” and they are ranked the same as a IB diploma WL grad. Admissions aren’t looking at individual courses for every applicant. On top of the small school size it’s a great advantage.

They are challenged fine, because the on level courses can be taught with more rigor because they don’t have kids who can barely read with checkout parents in their general population (thanks opt in only lottery).

[Anonymous]

Fun fact -- HB has eight class periods to allow students who need to leave early to go to sports at their home schools to do so. There is a lot of pressure on top-performing students to squeeze in an eighth class to load up on APs junior and senior year.

Cry harder, OP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No pressure to take intensified classes since there aren’t any at HB and therefore kids will always be in the most rigorous classes for purposes of colleges until they take AP their junior or senior year. This does not seem fair.

What is the unfair advantage? Being less challenged before going on to college?

I don't know who the H-B hater is on this board but you need to find a productive hobby. This one is pretty sad.

Don’t be coy. The counselors will mark their transcript “most rigorous” and they are ranked the same as a IB diploma WL grad. Admissions aren’t looking at individual courses for every applicant. On top of the small school size it’s a great advantage.

This a hundred percent!!

[Anonymous]

The time and energy that some of you have to devote to the absolute *minutiae* of your kids’ HS, and the minute theoretical impact that this thing or that may have on their college admissions process—and implicitly, their lives and worth as human beings?—is at once astounding, sad, and batsh&t insane.

Tell your kid you work hard, try new stuff, be kind. Eat dinner with them sometimes. The rest will take care of itself.

[Anonymous]

A bigger problem is that there are not enough AP classes that are offered so it's almost impossible to take as hard a course load as other schools unless you plan to take advanced classes elsewhere, which APS does not always recognize. However, you might need a crystal ball to know which courses may or may not be feasible to take in any given year at HB, not to mention the dearth of fine arts classes restrict you to certain time blocks only. Some AP courses, such as in science and math, traditionally conflict in time block so it may be impossible to fit them in during the 2 or 3 grades you're able to. All AP courses are very limited in number of classes offered per year so supply/demand forces students to wait until senior year to take the easier, more popular ones, thus having to take AP courses out of the traditional sequence. Some AP classes are taught along with the non-AP version of it so I'm guessing class prep for the AP test may be more difficult. Also, the availability of teachers is limited so it's not uncommon to see teachers teaching a particular course for the first time a kid is taking it, or is teaching an AP class that is outside the dept/field that they normally are teaching classes in; the teachers may know the material but since AP tests are standardized, they may have less familiarity with how best to prepare students for the actual test.

And, in general, if there is no true advanced level class for a course offered that has only very high performing students, the fact remains that any APS class, intensified or not, will probably be at a level where, if the kid is struggling, they're probably not looking at a college that actually cares about these lower level classes since APs will weigh more heavily anyhow. So yes, if you're an average student, the OP's argument may hold. But if you're competing with other kids from schools within/outside the county for a finite number of spots at competitive colleges, your transcript may not look as good. Just compare the colleges that HB kids get accepted to vs other high school kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The time and energy that some of you have to devote to the absolute *minutiae* of your kids’ HS, and the minute theoretical impact that this thing or that may have on their college admissions process—and implicitly, their lives and worth as human beings?—is at once astounding, sad, and batsh&t insane.

Tell your kid you work hard, try new stuff, be kind. Eat dinner with them sometimes. The rest will take care of itself.

Yours is a white privilege argument. Not everyone has the accumulated generational wealth and extended family where a degree less of "success" or "wealth" can be mitigated. Not everyone can putz along in high school and college and gain easy entree in the professional fields that their parent, grandparent, or family friend are entrenched in. Not everyone has the comfort in knowing that they qualify for closer to 100% of the available seats at a given school/firm but other less desirables are gatekept by history or quotas and must fight with each other over a number of seats that is much fewer than 100%. White kids are allowed to mess up many times and call it growth through experience; others may not even get a second chance. How easy it is to gaslight others when you think you're punching down.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Fun fact -- HB has eight class periods to allow students who need to leave early to go to sports at their home schools to do so. There is a lot of pressure on top-performing students to squeeze in an eighth class to load up on APs junior and senior year.

Cry harder, OP.

Okay? So WL has 21 AP courses and probably 35 IB courses.

HB has 14 AP courses, 3 of them different languages.

Taking the most rigorous path at HB is like phoning it in at WL.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:A bigger problem is that there are not enough AP classes that are offered so it's almost impossible to take as hard a course load as other schools unless you plan to take advanced classes elsewhere, which APS does not always recognize. However, you might need a crystal ball to know which courses may or may not be feasible to take in any given year at HB, not to mention the dearth of fine arts classes restrict you to certain time blocks only. Some AP courses, such as in science and math, traditionally conflict in time block so it may be impossible to fit them in during the 2 or 3 grades you're able to. All AP courses are very limited in number of classes offered per year so supply/demand forces students to wait until senior year to take the easier, more popular ones, thus having to take AP courses out of the traditional sequence. Some AP classes are taught along with the non-AP version of it so I'm guessing class prep for the AP test may be more difficult. Also, the availability of teachers is limited so it's not uncommon to see teachers teaching a particular course for the first time a kid is taking it, or is teaching an AP class that is outside the dept/field that they normally are teaching classes in; the teachers may know the material but since AP tests are standardized, they may have less familiarity with how best to prepare students for the actual test.

And, in general, if there is no true advanced level class for a course offered that has only very high performing students, the fact remains that any APS class, intensified or not, will probably be at a level where, if the kid is struggling, they're probably not looking at a college that actually cares about these lower level classes since APs will weigh more heavily anyhow. So yes, if you're an average student, the OP's argument may hold. But if you're competing with other kids from schools within/outside the county for a finite number of spots at competitive colleges, your transcript may not look as good. Just compare the colleges that HB kids get accepted to vs other high school kids.

Wow, you simultaneously proved OP point but also completely misunderstood.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No pressure to take intensified classes since there aren’t any at HB and therefore kids will always be in the most rigorous classes for purposes of colleges until they take AP their junior or senior year. This does not seem fair.

What is the unfair advantage? Being less challenged before going on to college?

I don't know who the H-B hater is on this board but you need to find a productive hobby. This one is pretty sad.

Don’t be coy. The counselors will mark their transcript “most rigorous” and they are ranked the same as a IB diploma WL grad. Admissions aren’t looking at individual courses for every applicant. On top of the small school size it’s a great advantage.

They are challenged fine, because the on level courses can be taught with more rigor because they don’t have kids who can barely read with checkout parents in their general population (thanks opt in only lottery).

College admissions is not some purely quantitative formula where every input matters down to the fourth decimal point. For one thing, rigor of the high school program is only looked at to evaluate the GPA, which is given less weight than test scores assuming you sent them in. And at most of the top 50-100 schools and at all of the public colleges and universities in Virginia, there are dozens if not hundreds of kids with the exact same stats and profiles. An H-B graduate versus an IB diploma from WL doesn't matter that much in a pool of 56,000 applications to UVA. The advantage at H-B is for the kids themselves--preparing them for college by giving them more independence and responsibility, and giving more individual-level support with the application process. But it's not an advantage in admissions decisions.