<p>UCB - yes and no. These courses are year long vs one semester. The only one considered to represent two semesters of college is Calc BC. </p>
<p>However, some of those history classes cram so much material they should represent two semesters.</p>
<p>Xiggi wrote
ĀI really have to wonder about the correlation of hard work and talent. If a talented athlete trains 1 hour a day, will he get much better with four hours a day?Ā</p>
<p>Generally the talented athlete trains 3-4 hours a day. The average athlete trains 1 hour a day.</p>
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<p>Thatās why I wrote ā(not āAP liteā level, nor spreading a semester of college material over a year in high school AP courses)ā.</p>
<p>Some other AP scores besides calculus BC do sometimes get a full year of subject credit in college, like US history, biology, physics C (both parts together). In addition, a high school can do the semester-equivalent ones like statistics, the government ones, psychology as semester-long courses instead of year-long courses to approximate college rigor.</p>
<p>For the University of Texas, note that many of the AP scores do give subject credit for two semester-long courses totaling 6 to 8 credit hours:
<a href=āhttp://ctl.utexas.edu/programs-and-services/student-testing-services/search-for-exams-by-type/#20[/url]ā>http://ctl.utexas.edu/programs-and-services/student-testing-services/search-for-exams-by-type/#20</a></p>
<p>My kids did have friends who stayed up into the wee hours. For most of high school my son was heading off to bed around 11:00. Sometimes he was up later, probably during junior year but when he did that he often napped the next afternoon before hitting the books. I would not have allowed staying up until 2:00 or 3:00 on an ongoing basis. Had that happened, the kid would have been taking a lighter load the following year. I think itās especially worrisome that some kids would get four-five hours of sleep and then drive the next day, when they are not experienced drivers to start with.</p>
<p>A lot of teachers and counselors at our school also gave dire warnings. Itās probably partly because they care about the pass rate and want kids in the class who can manage the workload. But I think the reason they did it is because so often parents were the ones pushing their kids into AP courses and the teachers are the ones who see how badly it turns out. Itās really tragic when a kid takes the wrong AP course, gets a C or a D and destroys what could otherwise have been a great transcript. It serves no one, not the high school and not the student. </p>
<p>Iām a fan of AP classes. My kids took a whole lot of them. But I think itās really important to take the classes that play to a kidās strength and to do what is right for an individual kid. Too many kids are trying to keep up with whatās right for the few top kids.</p>
<p>That could be true for swimming. Or perhaps for the poor guys who are stuck with playing football for a crazy coach in a crazy football state. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the best soccer players in the crazy soccer state of Texas practice three hours a ā¦ week. Twice a week for three hours. </p>
<p>Perhaps I should have clear that my musing was about high school students and not about Jordan or Woods.</p>
<p>Xiggi
The swimmers I am taking about are in high school and are ranked in the top 10 nationally for their age. These are the same swimmers who go on to compete at the NCAA D1 national championships in college and/or are recruited by Eddie Reese to swim at UT Austin.</p>
<p>And, how does that contradict that ā¦ this could be true for swimmers, as I wrote above.</p>
<p>My example of soccer players undermines the claim that GENERALLY the best athletes train for 3-4 a day and that average for 1. It is actually far from general for high school students to train 3-4 hours a day.</p>
<p>Thereās no shortcut for some APs and there is for other APs. Some kids can self-study, get 5s, skip it in college and do well at the next level. 7-9 hours of sleep should be part of a high school studentās schedule, 6-8 APs or not. Working extremely hard is a must in med school maybe.</p>
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<p>The agency that accredits residency programs (AAMC) now mandates limits on the number of consecutive hours a resident may work. I believe that 30 hours is the maximum, with significant restrictions in their duties after 24 hours. This only applies to residents in a teaching hospital, not fully-trained doctors in the community setting. </p>
<p>A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Assoc. found that reduced resident working hours had beneficial effects on patient outcomes. There was a famous case in New York many years ago when a patientās death was felt to be directly attributed to a residentās sleep deprivation.</p>
<p>Sleep deprivation, as mentioned by other posters, can lead to serious problems. It is not known what the purpose of sleep is, but it is felt to have widespread effects on many organ systems, not the least of which is the brain. Sleep helps consolidate memory. This is crucial if students want to retain information they have learned after a long night of studying.</p>
<p>Xiggi-
My experience is different from yours. Around here not only the top but even the just really good soccer players play on multiple teams. Theyāre on a middle or high school team playing 4-5 days a week plus practicing twice a week with a club team and playing at least one game on the weekend. In some cases these same kids are also playing on an ODP (Olympic Devāt Program) team. Even in the winter these kids are playing indoor soccer and footsal. Itās not uncommon for kids to go from school to practice, then straight to a second practice. Add in travel time and fitness and my estimate would be that the varsity calibre players here (the only ones with a hope of being recruited to a Div. 1-3 team) spend at least 15-20 hours/week training during soccer season. Gotta get in your thousand touches.</p>
<p>I have to agree on the issue of sports practice. Our soccer teams do practice 2 times a week for about 3 hours. But thatās just the team practices, and that applies to just about any sport. The top players practice their skills on their own, or in small groups, apart from team practices.</p>
<p>The difference for swimmers is the availability of a pool. A small handful of top swimmers may in fact have their own pools where they can practice, but most must practice at the local pool with their team. The swimmers on our YMCA youth team practice 2-3 hours a day during the competition season, with the team - and the best of those still get practice time in on their own as well.</p>
<p>The same can be said outside of sports. The top dancers are in classes at least 3 days a week, and also practice on their own. The classes are time spent with the instructor, but they are expected to practice on their own. Top musicians put in at least an hour a day on individual practice, sometimes 2-3, and then spend time with their teachers, plus whatever ensembles they perform with.</p>
<p>Practice is not just the time spent at practice with the team.</p>
<p>The phenomenon of top students working past midnight, sometimes until well into the wee hours of the morning, is troubling. The health consequences of abbreviated sleep hours, night after night, are well documented. As a parent, I canāt imagine saying, āWell, if itās what all the top students are doing, I guess itās okay if my child is getting four hours of sleep a night.ā Itās not healthy! As bad habits go, itās better than smoking, but itās not something I would encourage or support if I cared about my childās health. For what? Really. For what? Please report what your kidās doctor says when you mention that you are letting your child get several hours less sleep per night than she needs so she can be competitive for elite school admissions.</p>
<p>āI believe that 30 hours is the maximum, with significant restrictions in their duties after 24 hours.ā</p>
<p>Isnāt this a ridiculously long shift?</p>
<p>No, itās better than the old days when we worked an on call day that lasted from 7am until about 6 pm the next day (this was for pediatrics, surgeonsā on call days could start at 5 and go til later than 8). After the Libby Zion case the hourse were reduced to about 36 hours solid (before, they were kind of amorphous) and now 30 hours but after 24 your duties are supposed to be limited.</p>
<p>The standards, approved by the ACGME in September 2010, call for a variety of changes. They include increased resident supervision, limiting first-year residents to 16-hour shifts, educating residents and faculty about sleep deprivation, and ensuring effective transfers of patient care</p>
<p><a href=āhttp://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/07/11/prsa0711.htm[/url]ā>http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/07/11/prsa0711.htm</a>
2nd year residents- 24 hours plus a 4 hour transition. Suppposedly 80 hours/week max, averaged over any 4 wk period.</p>
<p>[whining] Interns (first years) have it so eeeeeeeeeasy! In my timeā¦</p>
<p>^ Thatās why change is slow in medicine. The old farts ***** about how it was in the old days (when I trained some of the older attendings could remember when they LIVED in the hospitals (thatās why they were called residents)! </p>
<p>Sleep issues are important for residents, definitely. But these are young adults. In the developing adolescent brain, good sleep hygiene is even more important. Comparing high school students and residents is kind of apples and oranges.</p>
<p>texaspg-</p>
<p>As jaylynn said, 30 hours is huge improvement. We often would log 38-40 hours consecutively. Those last 3-4 hours were always a complete blur. I would often not remember the next day what I did (or didnāt do) in those bleary-eyed hours. One of my fellow residents fell asleep while driving home and rolled her car on the highway.</p>
<p>I donāt think sleepwalking through high school is conducive to learning or retaining information. Itās obviously not healthy in many other respects.</p>
<p>So, why are students sleep deprived? Too much homework, too challenging? Or overloaded? Choosing too many APs? Thereās an irony that we list the number of APs, then complain about the hours. Or?</p>
<p>@CTS: My daughter dances three weeknights for 3 hours at a time, four or more hours on Saturday and extra times for rehearsals for productions or competitions. Itās not just ātopā dancers, but anyone committed to getting as good as she/he can with a POSSIBLE eye toward dancing in college or professionally. She doesnāt practice on her own at home except to push the furniture out of the way and āmarkā her pieces, but she does have to stretch and sometimes do PT exercises on off days.</p>
<p>A kid with this level of commitment to an activity absolutely need a study hall, in my opinion, and sometimes has to make the choice to not take the most rigorous classes in every subject simply because she/he wonāt have the time to keep up with the work. If this choice circumscribes my daughterās college options, that is something we will have to accept. There is no way she would give up dance for a more āimpressiveā transcript, when she sees dance being part of her life for a long time to come.</p>
<p>āI donāt think sleepwalking through high school is conducive to learning or retaining information. Itās obviously not healthy in many other respects.ā</p>
<p>This assumes there is something being taught that needs to be retained which is an entirely different matter.</p>
<p>From what I have seen, kids get their fair share of sleep. Whether it needs to be an 8 hour stretch every day or 50-56 hours over a week is not something I have seen any studies on.</p>
<p>FWIW, my kid is complaining about getting a lot less sleep in college because of so much of running around being done in the dorms. So it never ends.</p>