Reply to If your kid was a top student and didn’t get into a top college

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "If your kid was a top student and didn’t get into a top college "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We do not have a forced rank system in this country. We do not have a real, legitimate hierarchy of colleges, and we do not have a straight up system of ranking every single kid in this enormous, diverse country. Too many people seem to believe otherwise, and it is a toxic falsehood.

There is no such thing as a top school or a top kid. There are many, many excellent schools, and many, many academically strong students at every college. Students choose schools for a huge variety of very good reasons reasons. Colleges choose students for a wide variety of very good reasons (unrelated to what you might think is the best reason). Perhaps the worst reason to choose a school is its perceived rank or prestige.

Grow where you are planted. The garden is gigantic with an enormous variety of vital plants, and there isn't one best flower.

[/quote]
This is a great post. I would love for ambitious parents to understand this lesson by MS or freshman year of HS at the latest so they could not only give their kids much better advice than many on here do but help them see the world through a different lens. Smart, hard-working kids do well wherever they go. [/quote]

+1000

My own kid was likely "hurt" this admission cycle by a choice we made at end of 10th grade.  Decision was to stop FL after level 3.  No level 4 course, next one was AP and the AP teacher sucked (had teacher, really bad experience not willing to do that again during covid while online and make kid miserable).  So kid decided to focus on 3-4 AP STEM courses each year for Junior and senior year and not take AP Spanish.  Also choose to not take AP English in 11th, as it would take 15+ hours extra per week and that doesn't work with 20+ hours of outside sports each week.  So my kid picked the AP courses that mattered most and were most interesting (AP Calc AB, AP CHEM, AP STATs and AP CS A seem rigorous enough for junior year for a future engineer).  
My kid and I both know the lack of AP English and continuing for 4+ years of FL might have been the difference in getting rejected from ED at T10 and WL at another T20 school. But then again, it might not have made a difference.  But what I do know is that during a difficult year of covid, online school, my kid was much happier and healthier with their choices of [b]4 elite stem AP courses[/b] and skipping what would have made life really stressful.  Doesn't regret choices really.  Turns out where kid is attending, the AP eng would not have given an AP credit as the core curriculum must be completed there (and it was the same for kid's 2nd choice as well).  In the grand scheme of life, the year of misery and lack of sleep that would have ensued from adding those courses would not be worth the slight chance of getting into T10 (and who knows if it would have helped)
[/quote]

What the heck is an "elite" AP course?  More rigorous or difficult, I can understand, but "elite?"  For goodness sake ....[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics