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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How’d the rest of the process go - interviews, etc?  I wouldn’t freak out per se over this one set of grades but it does leave a bad taste at the very end. Might hurt your app in the eye of a super academic TT but doubtful it tanks your app across the board.  I feel for you, it’s a tense time!! [/quote]

Thanks! That all went pretty well, he seems to have genuinely bonded with a couple of the interviewers (shared hobbies / book interests).

We ended up getting the 2's upped to 3's, but it seems like the two basic problems were:

a) Some incomplete assignments, which neither we nor he knew about, though they claim to have told him. There was no mention of any missing work in the parent-teacher conference, and no email or other feedback home about it; we had no inkling about it until this week.

b) Apparently, having been very focused on the ISEE this fall, he applied ISEE protocol to a couple of math tests - went through them really quickly without showing his work - and got dinged for that in math.

They also reassured me that they wrote him a good recommendation - that the grades unfortunately could only reflect the work he turned in, but that they assessed him as much brighter than that. Nevertheless I'm exceedingly ticked off that they did not warn me - and arguably even actively misled me - about how he was doing in class, and at myself for taking their word for that and not insisting they send home every assignment as it was graded.

So maybe still salvageable - we'll see in a few weeks - but the in retrospect very obvious takeaway is that if you're currently in public school but planning to apply to private schools for middle, you need to be *extremely* pushy about getting feedback early; demand all graded work as soon as it's graded, check in every couple of weeks, basically make it impossible for them to give your kid anything less than a 4 by forcing them to account for every way your kid is falling short of that standard in the moment and addressing it with your kid in each case.

Once all of this is settled, I plan to write to the principal + district pushing for grades 4/5 to adopt open gradebooks (Jupiter/JumpRope) like they use in middle school; particularly given the return of screened admissions, I think grades in upper elementary school are too important to be only tallied up irregularly, and families ought to have a running average available throughout the year.[/quote]

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