Anonymous wrote:How is MCPS able to do Honors for all? In DCPS we can’t even do grade level for all, let alone honors. What is happening to all the kids below grade level in MCPS?

Anonymous wrote:The privates may be getting rid of the classes but students are still expected to take the tests.

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Anonymous wrote:
My senior just graduated, OP, with a dozen AP classes, like many students.

AP is the new Honors.
Honors is the new Regular.
Regular is the new Remedial.

This has been going on for years.
If you don't know this, you haven't been paying attention.

If you care at all about college admissions, you have to play that game. There are plenty of 4.2 wgpa, multiple-AP students who are rejected from UMD.

True. When low skill students are mainstreamed, honors becomes regular. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but I agree that you have to be aware of it.

Parents want their kids to do well and pressure the school to make exceptions. This has led to things like SAT scores being boosted by 200+ points relative to scores before 1990, or 40% of the class having an A average instead of just 5%.

I even remember when you had to get recommended for classes like AP English. Some parents would pressure the school to let their children into it, which then would dumb it down.

Honors for all was a completely predictable result.

The bolded is not the same. Students are better prepared for the SAT, and it has been renormed.

For the rest, you can whine about nomenclature all you want, but the net result is that you need to work the system for your kid. That's all. Honors is now a normal thing, so your kid can only stand out with a ton of APs, fantastic ECs, etc.

It's an arms race. You can choose to participate or not.

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Anonymous wrote:
My senior just graduated, OP, with a dozen AP classes, like many students.

AP is the new Honors.
Honors is the new Regular.
Regular is the new Remedial.

This has been going on for years.
If you don't know this, you haven't been paying attention.

If you care at all about college admissions, you have to play that game. There are plenty of 4.2 wgpa, multiple-AP students who are rejected from UMD.

True. When low skill students are mainstreamed, honors becomes regular. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but I agree that you have to be aware of it.

Then schools should be more forthcoming about it. Instead what's been happening is the regular courses have quietly been eliminated and all kids are being assigned to honors regardless of what their grades have been.

Forthcoming? What more do you want, if you look at courses offered and don't see a regular class for that subject? Are you going to assume that all students magically became good at the subject, or are you going to understand that the "Honors" class is just the least challenging class?

I see you belong in the Regular class, PP

You don't understand. When our then-8th-grader was registering for 9th grade, the school's registration form listed both regular and honors classes for English and Biology. But then when they got to 9th, the regular classes had disappeared and every 9th grader was put into 'Honors' English and 'Honors' Biology. There was no explanation about this change ever shared by the school. We only found out it happened because a parent shared the info on the listserv.

DP but what's the problem there? Maybe there was not enough students taking the regular classes, or maybe they were challenging everyone to their potential?

NP. no, they dumbed it down. And they do nothing in MS to prepare kids for the more rigorous AP classes.

Yes, they dumbed it down. This is how MCPS describes honors courses. Does any honors course even resemble this?:

Honors courses provide expectations and opportunities for students to engage in more rigorous and complex content and processes and to develop authentic products that reflect the student’s understanding of key concepts. The curriculum in each Honors course includes appropriate adaptations for enriched learning to pursue in-depth studies that require abstract and higher-order thinking skills.

It would be nice if on Back to School night, teachers of honors courses would explain to parents how their class will be providing the above.

At our school, this is not the case at all. They have helped students rise to new heights, but I did hear at the lesser schools they had to dumb it down.

Anonymous wrote:My kids would have been Churchill HS students. We pulled the first one out after middle school and the second one never attended an MCPS school. What we learned by accident is that the private schools they attend offer much fewer AP courses that start in junior year. So the pressure on the kids is much less and they are still surrounded by strong academic students. My oldest got into and just graduated from a top 20 university. My youngest just completed 9th grade and next year will take 3 honors classes...no APs offered in 10th. The school she attends is small and sent 25% of their graduates to top 20 schools last year.

In my opinion, private school pays off big in this area...unless you have a kid that thrives on being stressed out. I don't know too many kids like that.

Transplant_1 wrote:Thank you. Why do they do this? Under resourced? In the name of equity? Both?

Anonymous wrote:My kids would have been Churchill HS students. We pulled the first one out after middle school and the second one never attended an MCPS school. What we learned by accident is that the private schools they attend offer much fewer AP courses that start in junior year. So the pressure on the kids is much less and they are still surrounded by strong academic students. My oldest got into and just graduated from a top 20 university. My youngest just completed 9th grade and next year will take 3 honors classes...no APs offered in 10th. The school she attends is small and sent 25% of their graduates to top 20 schools last year.

In my opinion, private school pays off big in this area...unless you have a kid that thrives on being stressed out. I don't know too many kids like that.

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Anonymous wrote:The privates may be getting rid of the classes but students are still expected to take the tests.

PP here. The private schools my kids attend(ed) never "got rid of the classes." The number of AP classes is just less than in public schools and start later. Not sure what you mean about them being "expected to take the tests."

Another big difference is that students have to be approved by faculty to take any honors or AP classes, which keeps the classes on a high level. My daughter knows quite a few students who were upset they were not approved for honors English for example.

Anonymous wrote:

Transplant_1 wrote:Thank you. Why do they do this? Under resourced? In the name of equity? Both?

Equity for sure. They have multiple sections of each class and could easily have some be regular and some honors, and that's what they used to do. But everything is changing after the antiracist audit.

Anonymous wrote:

Transplant_1 wrote:Thank you. Why do they do this? Under resourced? In the name of equity? Both?

Equity for sure. They have multiple sections of each class and could easily have some be regular and some honors, and that's what they used to do. But everything is changing after the antiracist audit.