Math Placement

[Anonymous]

I dissent from all of the advice. Get your child placed in the class you want or leave. The schools are terrible at placement and you will regret it later down the road in college admissions

[Anonymous]

How are the schools terrible at placement? The student did not answer enough questions correctly to prove content understanding. Seems pretty objective. Disagree about college admissions- now through 3 of 4 kids. If you have a kid that is going into STEM, you want them to understand the foundations well, IMO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I dissent from all of the advice. Get your child placed in the class you want or leave. The schools are terrible at placement and you will regret it later down the road in college admissions

Only if you’re hung up on top 50 schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our child was placed one level below his current level in math placement for 9th grade. We are not happy about it. What can we do to address this with the school? Will they reconsider their decision? They are offering a retake of the test in June which may be too late. What if he still gets placed below level?

Are we on the hook to pay the entire year tuition if we remove him from the school at this early stage? We haven't paid all the fees, just the contract fees which but the way is also a nice chunk.

It sounds like the only way he stays in the lower level math is if he doesn't do well on the retake. Am I wrong?

If he does poorly on the placement test twice, then you should listen to the school.

+1. Your kid is not proficient in the material. If you push them they will (a) do poorly in math in 9th and (b) won’t be on the trajectory for calc that you want them to be on.

I predict this ends poorly for your child.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How are the schools terrible at placement? The student did not answer enough questions correctly to prove content understanding. Seems pretty objective. Disagree about college admissions- now through 3 of 4 kids. If you have a kid that is going into STEM, you want them to understand the foundations well, IMO.

+1. The exam is written by people in the math department who will be teaching this student. He doesn’t know enough. They don’t want to set him up for failure.

[Anonymous]

I think the trust the schools people are wrong. The placement tests are a very small sample size of material often learned two years ago. It is way less predictive of success in math classes than these people believe. We had a school that tried to keep our child out of Homors Algebra 2 in 9th based on the placement test when we’d always gotten As. We pushed strongly for it, he got As in that class, a 5 on the AP Calc BC, and the highest grade in the class in Linear Algebra. If we had listened to placement child would never have been on that track.

[Anonymous]

Ditto on the schools knowing what they are doing on placement. They are poor at this. People are way to trusting that the schools know what they are doing

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I dissent from all of the advice. Get your child placed in the class you want or leave. The schools are terrible at placement and you will regret it later down the road in college admissions

Only if you’re hung up on top 50 schools.

DP: What you will regret is bad grades from being accelerated without understanding. Every college will accept a student who took calculus, no matter the level. The most advanced math students do not necessarily get into better colleges than the other calc students.

[Anonymous]

Our kid tested and ended up repeating Algenra I, despite an A in the course in 8th, and will not be on track for calc at all. We are stuck (so yes fight it OP!) and worry we need to leave the school in favor of a place that will allow for more advancement. Anyone else find their child in this spot and how did they fare with college admissions etc?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our kid tested and ended up repeating Algenra I, despite an A in the course in 8th, and will not be on track for calc at all. We are stuck (so yes fight it OP!) and worry we need to leave the school in favor of a place that will allow for more advancement. Anyone else find their child in this spot and how did they fare with college admissions etc?

Geometry is a good class for summer school or get the school to approve him taking it online concurrently with Alg II next year (or see if the school will let him take both next year and forego an elective/study hall). There are plenty of accredited, online private schools where your kid could take Geometry if you need to go that route.

[Anonymous]

The problem is most parents in this area have no math background and so just blindly trust the schools. Sometimes their placement is on the money but many, many times it is not. This is one of the big downsides of the private schools. They think they know more than they do.

[Anonymous]

Many, many times?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Many, many times?

Many times what?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The problem is most parents in this area have no math background and so just blindly trust the schools. Sometimes their placement is on the money but many, many times it is not. This is one of the big downsides of the private schools. They think they know more than they do.

Many parents will fight tooth and nail to get their kids in a higher level math. My kid's school has a placement exam. If kids are zooming ahead or falling too far behind, the school will move them if necessary to give them the best chance of success.

(fwiw, we were considering asking to have our kid moved down a level, but a few weeks of afterschool homework support filled in some gaps and he's now fine.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our kid tested and ended up repeating Algenra I, despite an A in the course in 8th, and will not be on track for calc at all. We are stuck (so yes fight it OP!) and worry we need to leave the school in favor of a place that will allow for more advancement. Anyone else find their child in this spot and how did they fare with college admissions etc?

My kid did pre-calc in 12th grade and got it to all of the schools he applied to. Not top schools but still good ones.