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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My DS graduated from Swarthmore.  Sure, he worked hard, but I never heard/felt major stress from him. To those parents who think they see this INTENSITY when they tour, what are you seeing?[/quote]

I asked about this on a Swarthmore thread. I visited with my DS this summer and maybe because we had a very outgoing and funny tour guide, my kid came away very enthusiastic. But everything I read here claims it is an "intense" school - how do we know that? what does that mean? How are we supposed to know if a school is too "intense" for any particular kid?[/quote]

[b]My opinion isn’t going to be popular but it really comes down to a combo of natural ability and work ethic. [/b]Good work ethic can make up for a lack of natural academic ability, and natural ability can compensate for lack of work ethic, but the compensation both ways has its limits. You probably have a reasonable idea if your kid has good work ethic or not from their behavior, but it’s harder to tell if they have the natural academic smarts to make an intense school manageable. Sometimes AP/honors kids are just shocked by how much harder intense college academics are and it would be nice if they had some warning. I guess you can look at test scores as a hint, but I think it’s a real problem that the modern SAT is more preppable than the old one. While it’s admirable that some kids can study for over a year to get a really high score, those kids aren’t going to perform as well as the kids with equal study habits who can get a high score on the first try without study. [/quote]

I think we all agree with you there, but it's still hard for some parents to accurately assess where their kids are on that spectrum, especially if they've been surrounded by similar kids all their lives. I have one kid with special needs and one kid who is gifted so this was made clear to our family from the start! But other families may not have a built-in means of comparison.[/quote]

I’ve never known anyone to discredit hard work or natural ability, but I have known people who think the lack of one can totally be made up for by the presence of the other. But yeah I agree it’s really hard to tell where you’re really at when you have no basis for comparison.[/quote]

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