Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DD is glad she didn't get into TJ. The friends she knows there are struggling to make Bs while she has an unweighted 4.27 at her local HS.

How is unweighted 4.27 possible on a 4.0 scale?

In Loudoun, an A+ is worth 4.3.

Interesting. We don’t have A+. What % do you have to get to earn an A+? Our school won’t allow anything over 100, which is still an A. Taking AP tests is the only way to compare apples and oranges in some of these cases

There is a thread right now in the MD schools forum about how attending CAP (a test in humanities and communications program at Blair) harms college chances. A couple of posters of current students have stated that they aren't sure it's worth it.

Anonymous wrote:Picking a school solely for college admissions purposes is futile. You pick the one that you think your child will best learn and grow to their potential. Your child is never going to get into an elite college if they aren't one of the top students in their school no matter where they go. The top 5% is seldom going to make the cut, except at a super competitive magnet or extremely good private. If you go to a typical public or private high school in podunk USA, you not only have to be the best student in your class to get into an elite college, you have to be one of the best students in your teachers' careers.

This. I went to a HS in a blue collar area where only 40% of the kid went to college, and was second in my class and even with letters from a teacher that said I was one of the best students in a particular subject in 20 years of teaching, I didn't get into a HYPS school (I went to another Ivy where I was the only kid from my high school). Meanwhile, some of my classmates at college went to elite high schools and had 6-7 kids from their high school attend and were ranked in the top 30 in their class and still got in.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Top colleges know which are the ultra competitive private and public schools. They know what Andover, Exeter, Trinity, Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech means and they consistently target these schools more heavily than the mediocre privates or publics.

+1 At most of these ultra-elite schools the top 30%-50% enrolls at at ivy or ivy equivalent.

This is completely insane to think about but it is true. I know Trinity and Andover send something like 40%+ to the ivies + Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DD is glad she didn't get into TJ. The friends she knows there are struggling to make Bs while she has an unweighted 4.27 at her local HS.

How is unweighted 4.27 possible on a 4.0 scale?

In Loudoun, an A+ is worth 4.3.

I went to an average state university. There were definitely smart, high-achieving kids there, and a well-regarded honors college, but overall it was just average. It drew a lot of students from podunk nowhere local public high schools throughout the state. Very, very few of them were well-prepared for college. People in this area don’t realize that in much of the country, there are no AP or IB classes offered at high schools. Or maybe the school has 1 or 2 but not a full slate. My first college roommate graduated 1st in her class and had a 26 ACT.

Most of the kids I knew in this situation ended up dropping out after freshman year because they lost their merit aid due to poor grades and had to move back home, or they switched majors from STEM to something much easier and with fewer math/science requirements. So your kid could be a big fish in a small pond somewhere else, but without the benefit of a real college-prep HS curriculum, they might not make it through college. The retention rates at some of the public non-flagships are abysmal.

Anonymous wrote:Top colleges know which are the ultra competitive private and public schools. They know what Andover, Exeter, Trinity, Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech means and they consistently target these schools more heavily than the mediocre privates or publics.

+1 At most of these ultra-elite schools the top 30%-50% enrolls at at ivy or ivy equivalent.

Top colleges know which are the ultra competitive private and public schools. They know what Andover, Exeter, Trinity, Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech means and they consistently target these schools more heavily than the mediocre privates or publics.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DD is glad she didn't get into TJ. The friends she knows there are struggling to make Bs while she has an unweighted 4.27 at her local HS.

How is unweighted 4.27 possible on a 4.0 scale?

It's not possible. Maybe PP meant 4.27 weighted which isn't that impressive espe if a junior or senior in FCPS where top kids graduate with 4.5-4.6 weighted GPA.

Anonymous wrote:DD is glad she didn't get into TJ. The friends she knows there are struggling to make Bs while she has an unweighted 4.27 at her local HS.

While this was the right decision for your daughter, you have to take into account the rigor and courses at both schools. Colleges look at and are intimately familiar with the "school profile" of every high school in the region. What is a 4.27 at Marshall High School that offers the IB Program is very different than a 3.9 at TJ. It depends on the courses your child took advantage of at the school she attends. A 4.27 is great, depending on the rigor of her course load and if she chose to pursue that at her school.

Anonymous wrote:can work against you. Too many type A parents think if they buy a house in "the Best" district, their kid will be at an advantage. Same goes for Specializes HSs, the pool of kids is very hard to compete against, and you may or may not know, top colleges evaluate apps BY SCHOOL. So if 30 kids from the same HS apply to Harvard, they are all compared against each other. The same kid who did extremely well, but not tops, could have lived 10 miles away in a "mediocre" SD, and had much better odds.

I think you are looking at only one piece of the pie here. Its not just the school these parents are sending their kids to which help elevate them academically for the hope of an excellent college and then career success. Its all the OTHER things they pay for and support around that schooling and in addition to it. But I guess you don't know about those things because you're just a bitter outsider, attempting to look in.

Picking a school solely for college admissions purposes is futile. You pick the one that you think your child will best learn and grow to their potential. Your child is never going to get into an elite college if they aren't one of the top students in their school no matter where they go. The top 5% is seldom going to make the cut, except at a super competitive magnet or extremely good private. If you go to a typical public or private high school in podunk USA, you not only have to be the best student in your class to get into an elite college, you have to be one of the best students in your teachers' careers.

Anonymous wrote:DD is glad she didn't get into TJ. The friends she knows there are struggling to make Bs while she has an unweighted 4.27 at her local HS.

How is unweighted 4.27 possible on a 4.0 scale?

DD is glad she didn't get into TJ. The friends she knows there are struggling to make Bs while she has an unweighted 4.27 at her local HS.

We joke that we should've moved to a podunk small town USA. But seriously, I tend to agree about the big fish/little pond theory, but part of the issue is that if your DC does get into an elite university, you also want your DC to be well prepared and not behind, and I feel like the "lower" tier HSs wouldn't prepare a student as well as a competitive and/or magnet type HS. We are trying to find the right balance, but we are also not hankering on having our kids go to Ivy leagues. If they get in, wonderful but that's not what we're shooting for.