Reply to New STA parent seeking advice, suggestions, or just plain "I wish I had known X" info

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Lets clarify the prior entry. Some kids at STA do get straight A's, but they need to be very bright and very hard-working to get those results. Other kids get mostly C's and a few B's. There is a normal distribution and there is NO grade inflation. Current kids are compared against the achievement of former graduates, not just thier current classmates. [/quote]

Is it true that high schoolers still get into top 20 colleges with more than one c on their report cards?  Are these mainly recruited athletes?[/quote]

Sure - and some STA boys with no C's end up at schools like Indiana because that is the best fit for them.  About 20% of the typical graduating class will end up in "Top 20" colleges - which seems to be higher than any other school in the area - though most don't publish matriculation stats.[/quote]

With the caveat that these kids are getting into college on their own merits -- they were bright and talented when they got to high school -- the above numbers are actually low.  For at least the past 5 years, 20% or more of the graduating class has gone to the Ivies/Stanford.  St. Albans has a graduating class of 75 most years, so 15 kids matriculating at the Ivies/Stanford is 20% of the class.  If you expand the list to "top 20 schools," pulling in places like Duke, UChicago (both of which rank higher than the Ivies on a number of charts), Northwestern, etc., then the percentage of the St. Albans class going to a "top 20 school" is considerably higher than 20%.  [/quote]

St Albans doesn't release its year on year matriculation list, but there has been some suggestion that it is not as PP suggests above.  20% is probably about right if you say "Top20" is USNEWS Top 15 national +Top 5 SLAC.[/quote]

People have posted past matriculation lists that were accurate -- I think there's a thread that said something like "great college admissions year at St. Albans" that had a recent year posted that looked accurate to me.  Last year (class of '13) out of the class of 75 I believe that 12 boys matriculated at HYP alone -- you only need 3 more at an Ivy (and they had more than 3) to hit 20% for just the Ivy League.  I think the 20% figure sounds high to people but if you translate it into 15 boys it is not unreasonable, particularly given that STA has lots of National Merit Semifinalists, legacies, sports recruits, etc.  There is a wide range of colleges represented but the top 20 schools percentage is high.

It's not that relevant a discussion, in my view, other than for the point that (1) there are a lot of talented students at St. Albans, as is the case at a number of other independent and public schools in this region; and (2) the relatively high numbers who get into a school like Harvard or Yale (I've seen the numbers as an alumni interview for my college) suggest that the colleges are quite familiar with the local independent schools and do not artificially only take 1-2 kids.  But if your child (like mine) is not a NMSF straight-A kind of kid, those schools really won't be an option anyway.  However, with the benefit of Naviance it's much easier to get a sense of what schools your student will have a good chance at.

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