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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To Professors:

Can you tell which students attended [b]private prep high schools versus those with a public high school background[/b] ?

I am familiar with private day & boarding schools throughout the nation and would be shocked if graduates lacked the skills and maturity noted above by several posters.[/quote]

Not really; not consistently. If I had to draw patterns, I'd say: Private school students tend to have more familiarity with the writing expectations and higher initial skills, but the good public school students are more likely to rapidly improve from feedback.  This sometimes results in more growth and more interest which is likely to make them the strongest students.  I would say that private school students are more likely to be over-represented in the top quartile of my students, but likely to be slight under-represented in the top 1%.  Private school students seem to be more likely to attend office hours and have more composure in that context.  They are definitely not, as a group, stronger in intellectual curiosity.  If I forced to generalize, I'd say they tend to have less--at least less than the good public students--but the difference isn't noticeable and I could be wrong.  The most consequential difference is  unsurprising: the private schools students tend not to fall in the "worst" group.  So less variability, which makes my job easier.

The private school students who struggle seem tired, set free and/or above it all rather than not capable.  My most aggressive, outrageous "grade-grubbing" experiences have happened to have been with private school students, but I don't blame that on their schools rather just a personal sense of entitlement and a belief that everything is negotiable. All students, wherever they went to school, seem to struggle with managing distractions now on their own, and there doesn't seem to be a difference between groups.[/quote]

Yikes - I hope you are not my kids professor.

You seem to have a lot of preconceived notions about private HS kids. How can you even tell where they went to school? Or are you basing this more on social economic status than anything else? What are the outward signs of wealth you are basing this on? Type of jacket? Type of shoes?

[/quote]
If you notice, I began my answer that I couldn't consistently and reliably generalize, but if forced to I could note some patterns.   I tend to teach the advanced seminar undergraduate courses so I know my students and their backgrounds personally. There's a lot of conversation in class and before and after.  I regularly work with students on capstone projects.  You come to know where they are from, where they went to school, their pets back home etc.
I went to private school myself.   One of my kids went to public school and the other is at a private.  I made that decision on the environment I thought best suited to them.  I am not biased against private schools, but I also don't think they are universally superior to public.  I thought PP's question was notably biased in favor of private schools, however, so I may have been tempering that a bit. I tried to give my most accurate representation of my experience with students.[/quote]

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