Reply to s/o Do you think your DC's grades are well-earned or inflated?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "s/o Do you think your DC's grades are well-earned or inflated? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This topic drives me crazy.  My DD has absolutely earned her grades.  Which are a mix of A’s and A-‘s with lots of honors and 12 AP’s.  The amount of work she and others do at this age is staggering and humbling.  There is no comparison - none - with how things were when I was in high school. I was the kid that got into every Ivy I applied to and took high level classes in high school. I was well prepared for college.  Some of the stuff my DD’s class is talking about in AP physics C, I didn’t actually see until I was in grad school or final year of college.  The standards are higher.  The incorporation of math into high school curricula is higher.  The analysis done for papers in high school is higher.  If I were to look on naviance, my kid is one of the higher performing students in her class so admissions officers with the school report will clearly be able to see where she falls. They are not handing out A’s like candy.  And if in a certain class, 50% of the class is getting an A - we should all be proud because it means mastery of hard stuff.  If everyone in your kid’s class is getting 4’s and 5’s on an AP exam, why wouldn’t those kids all be earning A’s?  Why wouldn’t we celebrate the teacher that is able to bring the class to that standard?  Why wouldn’t we celebrate the kids who are putting in the time and effort?   Why do we spend our time denigrating their accomplishments?[/quote]

AP exam scores are not required.  That's the issue.  Plenty of kids getting 2s and 3s with an A in the high school class.  Right there tells you there wasn't mastery, but the kid doesn't submit the AP scores so how do they know?  We see this where there is a race to add as many as AP courses as possible and no bar to entry for the AP course.  Certain high schools have prerequisites (courses or grades needed first) and a teacher rec. Many publics have no such requirement.  IF you have a teacher that does allow many bites and corrections--I mean now you know the question so you can look up the answer and change it--doesn't mean there is retention and knowledge behind that.

I agree material is more complex and what we have seen in our school system is that pushing kids ahead and intensifying too early ends up being detrimental as they don't learn strong foundations in the math (or other courses) prior to build off of...and that's exactly why it is so hard for many kids.  Just pushing ahead beyond your knowledge base is not always best-but it's the world we created for kids these days.

And there will always be the kids (just like 30 years ago) that can learn and do the same amount of work (fast processors, good memories) in a fraction of the amount of time it takes other kids.  I used to think my kids weren't doing homework or something was wrong when parents would complain about the amount of homework in the class and the kid was taking hours each night and mine did most of it in study period and barely did anything at home.  They retained most of it just paying attention in class.

I don't know the answer. It's subjective.  GPAs are highly subjective.  It's why there should be additional academic standards in place to asses candidates for a bigger picture, but we have gone in valuing holistics with increasingly less emphasis on standards/academics.[/quote]

You really think a application reader for a region doesn't know the characteristics of the school a student comes from?  They may not have your kid's AP score, but know that most of the kids from that school that take the AP test get 4's and 5's (or conversely 2's).  This is part of their job and also a part of the school report (at our public school at least).  Sure this stuff is not obvious to people who sit around comparing (mostly made up) stats on message boards but this is not the global crisis some of you are making it out to be.  I matriculated from a PhD program in the most prestigious engineering school in the country.  The tippy top kids are better prepared now than they were then.  We should take pride in that as a country.  [/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