When your daughter comes out the other side of this, college will be easy.
âThe grade deflation though - wow!â
Thatâs at many of these top boarding schools. As I mentioned before, I wouldnât be overly concerned with that. Colleges understand the rigor and will not be comparing your child to schools with grade inflation. And I really think it is more about so many other schools having grade inflation these days than schools mentioned here have deflation. If you look at the honor roll listings at my local public school these days, itâs nuts. I think it would be more expedient to just list the kids not making honor roll. 
One of our local day schools did an in-depth evaluation of the homework load in middle school and discovered teachers were grossly under estimating how much time assignments were taking. (They thought they were assigning 30 minutes per class. Turns out each of those assignments were taking 45-90 minutes, which added up.) Maybe its time for schools to do a reality check on the time teachers think students take in doing each assignment⊠and finding out how long they really take?
I think this is an excellent thread for people to read through in the spring when they are considering options for schools.
All BS have a diverse group of students, with many different backgrounds and many different strengths and challenges. I would not be surprised to find outliers at every school who either find the workload to be ridiculously difficult or ridiculously easy, which is why I feel when asking a student about their experience at a school, you ideally want to ask someone who has very similar strengths and challenges to your child, because their answer might be the most applicable to what your child may experience.
But I think I would be pretty concerned about attending a school where most of their 9th graders feel like they are struggling with the workload, and that the pace is too fast, and things are expected to be memorized instead of understood, which is what the OP is saying.
My child is a 9th grader at a different BS and the workload seems to be just right for him. Challenging but not overwhelming. I like that there were options and ways to make the course load more or less challenging (can take a 6th course, but donât need to, different levels of courses) depending upon the student and their needs. My kid reports he has enough time to do school work, play a JV sport, do music, participate in a couple of clubs, sleep enough, and have time to hang out and relax (on weekends).
Our son found a service academy âeasierâ than his BS.
This isnât meant as a knock on service academies but his BS was more selective as well, at least in terms of academic ability, not factoring in things like athleticism, leadership, physical demands.
It has to be hard for the schools to manage the wide variation of homework time each student requires, along with the pace of the class. Kiddo was saying just last week that in his math class there are students who can bang out homework in 20 minutes and other students the same homework takes two hours. Yet the class level is correct for all of them.
In a way, smaller classes just exacerbate the problem. No one can hide - everyone knows who is fast or slow. As the teacher, do you slow the pace to make homework manageable for all (to the detriment of the faster kids) or do you speed up the pace (to the detriment of the slower kids)? Throw on top of that the repeat 9th graders and international students who have covered some material already. The result is parents complaining that the homework/pace is wrong for their kids, but in opposite directions.
Regardless, six classes including Latin?!? Yikes.
Kids can often move down and that should not be seen as shameful. There is often quite a bit of movement in class level at the beginning of the year for the student body.
At my kidsâ school, not the one being discussed here, 6 credit hours was normal. The first two years that was 5 classes (a double credit humanities class covering history, religion, English/language arts, and even some art history. Second two years, it is often 6 separate classes. One of mine took 7 classes consistently in order to build in multiple arts classes (performing and fine arts) as that is where the passion and interest was.
Interesting. Cateâs 9th grade curriculum is hard wired, but hard to capture in a whole number of âclassesâ. They do the combined humanities class, which is a double class schedule-wise, a rotating arts sampler class, a music class and a half unit Freshman seminar that covers everything from study skills to health class that is pass/fail. In total it is more than 6 âclassesâ, but not all have regular homework. It is more like 5 if you are evaluating workload.
On top of that, freshman grades arenât calculated into the studentâs gpa.
I donât think people appreciate how different the approach to coursework can be at the different schools. It is an eye opening exercise to map out what 4 years of coursework would look like for you at the various schools in consideration. One takeaway is that there isnât much room for electives anywhere, but the approaches to the core courses vary widely.
In terms of classmates that are repeating a year at the new BS, Iâll add that I didnât see a lot of repeating of coursework. For certain classes, like Humanities, every 3rd former/9th grader took 3rd Form Humanities but for Math, Science, Modern Languages, etc. each student was fitted to a path that was appropriate to them so students who repeated a year or a international student coming in from a different system could be much more accelerated. This was often seen in the different math and science levels students of the same grade were in. Of course, this could differ at other schools but I was used to seeing students being pushed to reach but reach in a manageable way.
I bet there are students at every school that choose to take the lower level language course, or repeat a science class in order to lighten the load, especially if you arenât confident that your prior exposure to the subject matter was sufficient. You have more opportunity to choose your level as a repeat than as a new 9th grader.
Just guessing, but it is probably less likely someone would choose/get away with a lower class in math. Schools are very attuned to math placement and have more options. For science, a lot of schools have a hard-wired order. 9th grade = physics, sophomores = chem, etc. so maybe you would get bumped up to honors chem if you had chem before, but you wonât skip it altogether. Could be wrong, just going by what kiddo said about there being international kids in his honors chem class that already took chem. Could also be an issue of having to have certain classes on your official transcript.
" 9th grade = physics, sophomores = chem, etc. so maybe you would get bumped up to honors chem if you had chem before, but you wonât skip it altogether. "
Like many things, this likely varies by school. At my childrenâs BS, I know student who did not repeat a science class at BS. This is fairly common, especially for new 10th or 11th graders who are coming in from a different system. Iâm of the impression that many boarding schools are less rigid in class placement than public schools on the whole.
At our school kids donât generally repeat science unless they repeat a grade. My kidâs honors physics class is pretty equally divided between freshmen and juniors. Almost all of the kids coming in 10th grade (and the handful coming in 11th) have done the traditional non-BS science curriculum with biology in 9th and chemistry in 10th so they take physics in 11th grade (like almost all of the kids in local privates and publics do). Being older and generally a lot more advanced in math, they make the class quite challenging for the freshmen. But they do not repeat anything just flip the sequence around.
One of the reasons Exeter was my top choice was the P/F first trimester. While she is claiming to do six hours of homework a day (plus a sport), the transition has been much smoother (and less stressful) as she has a chance to figure out how to navigate the new system. I think all schools should go P/F the first trimester. It sure takes the pressure down several notches.
^. Makes sense. They would have to do the switch just to make sure the students get the required courses.
It is the repeats that would pose the challenge. If the kid is repeating 9th or 10th coming from a not-so-good public, how does a school know what to do for science? Do repeats for 10th expect to take all 10th gradeâs classes (with the possible exception of math) all over again? Or do they expect to take 11th grade classes but just spend an extra year at school?
Sorry, I donât mean to hijack. But having repeats has to effect what the homework load is. Chem, for example, takes more time for kiddo than repeats. Thatâs a-ok so long as the load is calibrated for a student with no prior knowledge. But if 5 of 10 students have taken chem already, what is a teacher to do?
Repeat: There are a lot of repeats - at many BSâs, more repeats than even a few years ago. I have spoken with counselors at 3 NE BSâs often mentioned on this site and they have noted the impact on the overall vibe. There are people who can afford to have their kids repeat and get a leg up. If a student has already covered the material before, it makes it easy and some instructors instruct with the impression that there is a basic knowledge. Also, we know several students who prep over the summer by taking community college courses or summer school for AP Chem, AP Physics, BC Calc, etcâŠso they are better able to handle the workload in September. Please get our kids off the wheel!
@Golfgr8 Wow, prep in Science and Math over the Summer. Yikes. When do the kids ver get to read a book on the beach.
We kid told me there are many international kids in the most advanced science and math classes. Most are a couple of years ahead of American kids. In some cases, repeats and international kids have taken the course already. This could be tough if a kid wasnât strong in that subject to begin with. Itâs also a dilemma for a kid who is bright but came from a school that didnât teach that subject or taught it poorly.
Not all kids are coming from the same background. Some are at an advantage and some are not.
This varies by school. Itâs generally universal that the kid would take the next level in math and foreign language if (and this is a big if) they passed the corresponding placement test. Itâs also generally universal that they would take the grade-level English class, but the odds that the material repeats is slim. OK, they may read Romeo & Juliet again, but with a new perspective. Social studies is usually the grade-level course, but this often depends upon grade repeating and the students past courses; they generally donât make you retake USH, as an example. Science is often the next in sequence, but some schools (Lawrenceville comes to mind) have a lockstep science progression regardless of past exposure.
I doubt that repeats are the reason for the situation with the OPâs kid, but as I said earlier, I checked out once I heard the Latin requirement, so Iâm not as familiar with their curriculum.
Guys, donât worry about repeats, and kids more advanced than yours. Your kids will be fine! They will have an amazing experience, and will get into a college thatâs a great fit for them, I promise!
That said, do question if your kid has to do something just because everyone else is doing it. I just posted a thread about whether AP exams were important to take â I was surprised at some of the blowback â but, for my son they are irrelevant. I have never seen anyone post anything remotely like that about a standard rite of passage exam. But for my son it is true. So, think about whether something is really necessary, or not.
(I wish I didnât have to explicitly say that APs are not irrelevant for everyone. I do recognize that for some kids, maybe most, they are critical).
As a former teacher (at a BS, many years ago), I disagree with your child. I feel that for a math class to be the right level for a kid, the student needs to have learned the prerequisite material but the pace of the class also has to be right for the kid. If a kid is spending 20 min on HW daily, the pace of the class is probably too slow for that kid, and if a kid is spending 2 hours on daily HW, the pace of the class is probably too fast for that kid, and they need more time to reinforce the material. They all might have had similar knowledge levels coming into the class, but that doesnât make this class the most optimal class for all of these kids. It may, though, be the most optimal class the school has to offer for all those kids.
In my ideal world, there would be enough math and science class options to take into account prior knowledge and experience, along with needed pace. Some kids with little to no prior experience can do a challenging class with a fast pace, where as other kids even with prior experience may not be able to handle the same class.
Different schools try to do this in various ways. Some have honors classes. Others have different options for pace of classes: BC calculus in x terms vs. x+1 or x+ 2 terms, or BC calculus that requires AB calculus as a prerequisite vs. BC calculus for kids coming straight from pre-calculus.
If the set up is like that, it doesnât matter whether kids are repeats or not. Theyâd enter a math or science sequence where they belong, based on prior knowledge and needed pace.