Acceleration, Helpful or Not Helpful?

Parents Forum
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<h2>Following post is to let curious parents know, whether skippping grade will help their kids or not. Additions are welcome… :)</h2>

<p>Hi Sir/Madam,
If you are talking about skipping grade during elementary and middle colleges really don’t care, its upto you, you can make your kid do the whole elementary and middle in yrs, but when it comes to high school its not the same. Every single college in good standings, from regular to Ivy League (except community) requires FULL four years of high school. Sometime colleges do make exceptions, but there are no exception at Harvard or MIT as far as i know of.</p>

<p>If you ask about Internationally recognized universities like Oxford, Cambridge, NAU, Imperial, Melbourne, ITT etc they all require FULL four years of high school, note no exceptions, no matter how smart you son/daughter is. They also, if you’re from US, sometimes require Associate degree and AP courses. When entering for proffesional degrees in U.S a student must be atlest of 17rs old on the time of entrance and internationally its 18 yrs, so if your son/dau graduates at age of 15 from high school he/she will either stay home or go to county college or any another program. Note, If you’re planning to send your kids to Harvard ot MIT, i guess you’re not sending them for regular bachelor’s instead, for bachelor’s which is persuable for ex. BEng to MEng etc and is intensive and really competitive.</p>

<p>Most of all colleges want to know about your kids life, hobbies, activities, not just how many A='s he/she got. A student with 3.6 GPA with Volunteer or JOb experience has better chances of geeting into a college (take for instance, Harvard or Princeton) than a student with 4.0 GPA and no Volunteer or JOb experience or extracurricular activities. We need to maintain our students life by balancing academics and life-emics(as i like to call it)…</p>

<p>If you still have any questions, feel free to ask and for further investigation contact the university, where you/your kids want to go, but just remember people who teach at MIT, Harvard or Princeton etc were not all Ivy Leaguers, as matter of fact most them attended State or national Universities :D</p>

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<p>That post is an interesting piece of fiction. </p>

<p>I hope that no one makes the mistake of reading it and believing it.</p>

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<p>If i offended your ‘beliefs’ but call Harvard and tell them that you’re 14 or 15yrs old and going to graduate high school this year, with just A’s and no experience except of books and want to get in PreMed, see what they tell you… </p>

<p>I am at harvard from '05 and know personnally many people who didn’t get accepted beacuse they had no expereince… they were just straight ‘BOOKWORMS’… (thts the best way i know to put it)</p>

<p>Its not the ‘tag’ that matters, what really matters is from what ‘it’ is made of…</p>

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<p>If you are indeed at Harvard, may I suggest you look up a few who actually graduated early from high school? One of them is my own son. Nuff said.</p>

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<p>And I know one at Stanford and I’ve heard of some at MIT.</p>

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<p>Every single college in good standings, from regular to Ivy League (except community) requires FULL four years of high school. Sometime colleges do make exceptions, but there are no exception at Harvard or MIT as far as i know of.</p>

<p>Wrong
For example- a friend of my daughters dropped out of his high school, took his GED test and recently graduated from Uchicago
And what about all the homeschoolers that Harvard and MIT admit?</p>

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<p>This is incorrect. There are indeed exceptions. One of my daughter’s dorm-mates at Harvard didn’t have a full four years of high school. In fact he didn’t even have a high school degree. He was bascially a dropout. But he had plenty of other achievements to demonstrate his abilities and readiness for college.</p>

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<p>If the OP is saying that skipping grades is not a sure track to a top school, she is absolutely right. I know more kids who were rejected from Harvard(I know these kids personally) who were advanced enough and bright enough that they had skipped a year or two or more of school than I do kids in that category who got into Harvard. I worked briefly with two programs that do target precocious kids and get them into college early, and a goodly number of those kids were rejected from the very top schools which was why they were at these programs specifically tailored for such students. Tha† is not to say that Harvard does not have a disproportionate number of early birds who flew the highschool coop before doing the 12 years of 1-12 education, or the standard 4 years of high school. It’s just that it is not a prescribed path to improve one’s chances of acceptance to such school. Accelerating a child should be done because it is the best path to take at that time for that child, not to up the chances of getting into a highly selective school. And so it should be for most things in life that a child does–it should be done for the benefit of the child, not for enhancing chances for a specific goal. Great if it does both, but to count on it to do so is setting yourself up for disappointment.</p>

<p>There are parents who truly believe that because their child has outgrown his highschool, or accelerating his education, that he is prime ivy material. True, that if he has the academic markers, he is “material”, but his acceleration is not going to be given heavy weight during the admissions process. He will be measured among his peers who are also applying at that time, and no quarter will be given for the fact that he is younger. In fact, the age can be an issue if there are signs of social and emotional immaturity in the student. College is NOT all about the academics. </p>

<p>As for straight “BOOKWORMS”, if they are very good, interesting worms that have something to offer a college, they do tend to get snatched up in the app process in greater numbers than others in the candidate pool. The stats show this clearly. THe % of kids who are vals and sals, or with very high SATs that get in exceed the other categories with lower stats. I believe I read in several places, that Harvard has about a third of the class selected for academic prowress. I’m sure that some of those kids would qualify as worms.</p>

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<p>Bookworms?
I know at least two early high school graduates besides my S. One was intensely involved in opera (not a bookwormish kind of activity) and has gone on to be intensely involved in music at Harvard. The other was involved in sports and in Mock Trial and played an instrument. Your typical well rounded applicant, except that he excelled (was captain of the Mock Trial Team) and is not yet 17.</p>

<p>As for S, I like to think of him as an interesting bookworm. He does not often get bested in arguments. And then, there is Mini’s D who is sui generis.</p>

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<p>I love bookworms. I aspire to be one, and I married one!</p>

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<h2>Following post is to let curious parents know, whether skippping grade will help their kids or not. Additions are welcome… </h2>

<p><<<<</p>

<p>I know a family who skipped every one of their five kids, so that each was a year younger than their classmates. Those kids were pushed to take every AP class they could, to each study two foreign languages, and to push, push, push.</p>

<p>Interestingly, not one of them was accepted to Harvard, the family legacy school. Not one got into Princeton, Brown, or Yale. They all went to the University of Chicago, which they’d never “heard of before.”</p>

<p>I think they are all doing fine. :)</p>

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<p>Chicago historically has been more welcoming of young students than most. So has MIT.</p>

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<p>Also CMU (they include this in brochure). Caltech too admits maybe one 15 year old each year, and definitely accepts kids after junior year of HS. Many students there have skipped grades, so entering college at age 17 is quite normal.</p>

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<p>You lose. </p>

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<p>Again.</p>

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<p>And again.</p>

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<p>And again. </p>

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<p>Oh believe me, I have. This subject is of great importance to me. By the way, guess what, Texas 10% rule? I qualify for UT at the very very least. I’m not doomed to go to the local CC. MIT’s attitude was very positive towards younger applicants. They’re insanely awesome for that and other reasons too. There’s a reason why I’m applying EA. </p>

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<p>Yeah, well, guess what? I went down (up?) to their campus and talked to them this summer. I guess I could have told them I was 14yrs old and going to graduate high school this year, with just A’s and tons of extracurricular experiences as well as lots of book learning and wanted to get into Pre-med as well as engineering had I felt inclineded to do so. (I did mention it a bit I think) They might have been amused with some of the stories that I could tell about working with kids through my nonprofit.</p>

<p>Yes, some top schools were, admittedly, less welcoming but even they did not quite say “No”. Harvard and MIT were not among them though.</p>

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Nope, if you’re under 17 you are no allowed to stay in university owned accommodation in the UK without a parent or guardian and must be accompanied to lectures for legal reasons. But other than that if you meet the entry requirements it is possible to be accepted. There is definitely at least one 15 year old boy here in Oxford. However, I have heard they are thnking of changing this due to changes in the law and because of a case years ago about a student who was forced into attending by her parents and then ran away due to stress.
<a href=“http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/816469.stm[/url]”>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/816469.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I found the article below using google</p>

<p><a href=“http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1553412,00.html[/url]”>Oxford to turn away child prodigies | UK news | The Guardian;

<p>In general the school system in the UK is not about the number of years spent studying anything. It’s all about whether you have achieved an exam pass in a subject. Otherwise no number of years studying counts. You have to have nationally certified proof that you passed at the required level. Having said that, it’s considered unhealthy and unwise to skip years of school so it’s pretty unusual for anyone to take A-levels (exams needed for university entrance) under age 17.</p>