Are higher grades more important?

[Anonymous]

Sports are pretty important for kids with ADHD. Just FYI college apps offer the opportunity to include additional info if your academics were impacted, so your DC could talk about weighing these trade offs. There are tons of schools OP!

[Anonymous]

Sports at his school are intense. Daily practices for 2-3 months for 2-3 hours. There is only one sport he could possibly play this spring and it is a huge time commitment. He has never liked team sports anyway (he did fencing for many years outside of school) but it got to be too $$$.

[Anonymous]

Maybe not a popular opinion but many MCPS HS schools are rather good. We sent our oldest to a parochial school from K-8and public for HS. We realized the commute would offset any benefit that we thought Catholic would provide. I still drive DC to school she’s a junior and she gets 1 extra hour of sleep in the morning and an extra hour when she gets home

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maybe not a popular opinion but many MCPS HS schools are rather good. We sent our oldest to a parochial school from K-8and public for HS. We realized the commute would offset any benefit that we thought Catholic would provide. I still drive DC to school she’s a junior and she gets 1 extra hour of sleep in the morning and an extra hour when she gets home

We don’t live in MC. OP here. The education he is receiving is superior to what he would get here in public school. I am a teacher and tutored both high school and college students from our public school district. I was not impressed at all. My son has midterms and finals in all of his classes and our district got rid of them. I cannot imagine how ill prepared these public school students are when they get to college. I feel bad for them.

[Anonymous]

Even at Ivy’s, grades are far more important, compared to ECs, than is widely believed. But that doesn’t fit with the big dollar college counseling industry which tries to sell parents on advising and packaging. Better advice would be “go back to 9th grade and study harder.”

Certainly, if your DC is aiming for a highly ranked large state school, then there is even less emphasis on ECs. If you have Naviance I’d put some schools in to see what would be a reasonable target. If DC is having a hard time maintaining the needed grades that might inform your medication and EC decisions.

[Anonymous]

I don’t think we have access to Naviance in 9th grade and without SAT/ACT scores, would it be much use?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think we have access to Naviance in 9th grade and without SAT/ACT scores, would it be much use?

PP here. If you know someone with a kid in the grade above you could ask them to screen cap the scatter grams that you want.

At this point I’d just guess if SAT is likely to be strong, weak, or middling given the GPA. Even with a sophomore, you won’t know the PSAT until mid year and won’t know the SAT at all.

[Anonymous]

They take the PSATs in their junior year. I’ll ask a senior about Naviance.