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<p>My son stuck his neck out and had a genuine “failure” which he wrote about in one of his essays. He found out about the AP Siemens Award about 30 days before the AP tests were scheduled to start; to win, you need to have the most 5’s in math and science AP tests in your state before your last year of high school. Since he was graduating in 3 years, he had to qualify for this entirely in his sophomore year – and Illinois is much more competitive than, say, Indiana or Louisiana.</p>
<p>At this point, he was already taking 9 classes (with college and online) plus he had started teaching himself AB Calculus in Pre-Calc with the principal’s permission in February (he had to pay attention enough to also learn pre-calc and ace the tests). We determined that he would probably need 7 AP 5’s to qualify (actual points scored – AP internal data – are used to break ties). A secondary goal was to become a National AP Scholar in his sophomore year; only 19 students nationwide had done so as sophomores the previous year.</p>
<p>He was already enrolled in AP Stats, AP Physics B and AP US History and had previously taken two semesters of general chemistry at the local university, where he scored first among 90 college classmates. So, in 4 weeks in his spare time, he decided to teach himself half of the calculus textbook (part of AB and all of BC), both Physics C exams and Environmental Science. And he got permission from his counselor to take 8 AP exams.</p>
<p>I was amused by the idea, but figured he would come to his senses after a few days – there just wasn’t enough time. After a few days, I tried to talk him out of it, but he was determined. One long weekend I watched him “absorb” Physics C Mechanics and was actually starting to believe he might pull this off: For two afternoons, he went through a semester’s worth of material, never writing down a formula, just staring at it for a few minutes and committing its relationship to other formulas to memory; never doing a sample problem until the last day when he took some actual former AP exams and got strong 5’s.</p>
<p>He almost made it, but did not have enough time to read the environmental science textbook. He got six 5’s and a 4 in environmental science, plus a 3 in US History. His teacher had finished history up to the mid 1950’s, and that was the year after Reagan died, so there lots of Reagan-era questions that could have been Ancient Greece as far as he was concerned. Had he gotten a 4 in history, he would have qualified as a sophomore National AP Scholar, but he didn’t have time to "fill in the gaps’ because he was learning 4 new subjects.</p>
<p>This is about as legitimate an over-reach failure as a high schooler can achieve, but it wasn’t enough for MIT. Neither was his 36 ACT, dual 800 SAT IIs, 1/400 class rank, 7 winning ribbons in local math competitions and “best student of my career” letters of recommendation. I don’t know what the heck MIT really wanted, but my son fulfilled every description they had in their viewbook and still didn’t get in.</p>
<p>MIT was his dream school at the time, and his first rejection with its early 3/14 decision date. But by then he had already been offered large scholarships at UIUC and received two early-write acceptances at Williams and Amhert, who apparently approved of his efforts, based on their customized letters. In the end, he was also accepted to Brown and chose to attend there, and it appears to really be his dream school, with challenging math and science classes in a broader liberal arts environment with quirky good humor and self-directed, sometimes rather eclectic, classmates.</p>