'Chance' a Parent........

Parents Forum
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<p>You can try me. I’m a numbers person, I guess, so I remember mine. Sadly I remember SATs of many of my friends, now that’s sick.</p>

<p>Average high school, looking back, we had 6 weeks of calculus. Did they even have AP 30+ years ago?</p>

<p>Rank: 2/298
Scores: 590V 800M (63v, 75m psat which I think got me a letter, I’m not sure) recenters to around 650 or 660/800 today.</p>

<p>Achievement Tests: 711 English Comp, 737 Math 1, 717 Math 2…I remember we had virtually none of it, and NO ONE self studied in those days. 619 Chemistry.</p>

<p>NHS Pres, Latin Club Pres (biggest club in school, went on NYC field trip each year), basketball benchwarmer 2 years, some other clubs.</p>

<p>Major: Engineering (see SAT breakdown).</p>

<p>Applied: Lafayette, Princeton, Lehigh, RPI, Stevens, Penn State.</p>

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<p>Sure. I think they date back to the 1950’s. By the early 1970’s, they were already a pretty important thing in the New York area, at least at private schools. I remember taking four AP courses and exams – English Lit., US History (junior year), European History, and French. And from looking at some of the practice tests my son took, they really don’t seem to have changed all that much. Although I don’t remember too many specifics, except that in US History, I wrote an essay about the causes of the Civil War, and in English Lit., the poem we had to analyze was something by Richard Wilbur.</p>

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<p>I didn’t remember my scores, but when I saw this thread, I dug them out of a filing cabinet. I only kept my last SAT report. It had all the scores on it. At my school, they had us do the PSAT and SAT twice. They didn’t say much about achievement tests, but all (most? some, anyway) of the schools I applied to wanted to see several (3 is the number that sticks in my mind). I never heard of AP exams in high school.</p>

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<p>2331clk, I’d say you got in everyplace but Princeton and 50/50 on Princeton because it was engineering. I suspect a 590V would have been tough for a non-engineering applicant.</p>

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<p>By the way, DonnaL, sounds like we may have gone to the same school (I was Class of '77 at a small private school on East Side, predominantly Jewish, I was there K-12). </p>

<p>My stats would have me going community college all the way now, I think: </p>

<p>I was one and done on the SATs, 610 M and 700 V (in those days they specified the vocab and reading comp, and I had 800 vocab and 600 comp) … the day I took the SATs one of my contact lenses popped out at the beginning and like a schmuck I hadn’t brought glasses, a case or lens solution so I took the whole shebang with one eye covered (my vision was way too bad to be able to focus with both opened). </p>

<p>Achievements:
French 700
English Comp 690
English Lit 600</p>

<p>Grades meh. Mostly As and Bs, consistent Cs in math and science including a D in bio in ninth grade. Our class didn’t rank (only 30 kids in my class). </p>

<p>My strong points were DEFINITELY my ECs, primarily outside of school (was also leader of the acapella group and editor of the lit mag at school) …</p>

<p>I sang in the New York Oratorio Society (the only non-adult in the group) …</p>

<p>But my big “hook” was radio … I was apparently the youngest person in the history of NYC to get my radio license (known as “third with 9”) which is no longer needed on air, but at the time you had to take an extensive test through the FCC. The people at the FCC were the ones who told me I was the youngest (I was 14 at the time). I worked as an intern at NYU’s radio station for all four years of high school and the summers in between and by the summer before my senior year I was one of the regular newsfolks on air at 16. </p>

<p>See, none of this would mean anything anymore …</p>

<p>Applied Franklin & Marshall and Amherst (legacy), the latter of which I went for an interview in June of my junior year, two months before they welcomed their first co-ed freshman class. </p>

<p>Won’t keep you in suspense, was actually admitted to Amherst AT MY INTERVIEW because, I suspect, they really wanted to accept as many women as possible to make sure they got that co-ed thing happening … I was also going to apply to Williams, Emerson and Syracuse. Not, surprisingly, NYU despite how much I loved it there (and still worked at their radio station in the summers while I was in college) simply because I really wanted to go away to college. I found out later from my parents that I was also admitted to F&M at my interview but they didn’t tell me because they wanted me to look other places as well to keep an open mind.</p>

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<p>2331clk: I agree with shawbridge…in everywhere…50/50 chance at Princeton.</p>

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<p>A reasonable guess, but my high school was up in Riverdale. I did live on the East Side back then, though!</p>

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<p>Was, in fact, rejected at Princeton. In at the other 5, although I had applied to Penn State late as an afterthought…PSMain was full so received a branch campus assignment…not a top choice anyway.</p>

<p>My choice was Lehigh vs Lafayette, and I preferred Lehigh. Lafayette “offered” $1600 grant per year, Lehigh $800 grant/$800 loan. Mom drafted some sad but ultimately convincing letter, how we needed LU to match LC or I couldn’t attend…I called a couple weeks later and LU had matched the better award. So Lehigh it was.</p>

<p>After 3 semesters I became a premed…so much for engineering. Lehigh was great fun, academically challenging, was very happy there.</p>

<p>btw our val, the fellow ahead of me, WAS accepted at Princeton. He was brilliant. He declined them, however, for a $10,000 (total 4 years) scholarship to a school half way across the country, one unknown to all of us at the time…Washington University in St. Louis.</p>

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<p>Nah, I did unevenly at my LAC and was only there a year. I had a major clinical depressive episode, though it was not diagnosed because schools didn’t know so much about that stuff. I ended up having financial problems because of that and did not return to the school after my freshman year. </p>

<p>WRT SAT’s, I was unusual in that I took them many times, but that was because I was part of a pilot program SMPY, at JHU, which later became OVID and lead to the programs and Duke and stuff like that – where gifted middle schoolers took the SAT. I scored in the high 400’s in 6th grade. :slight_smile: For doing that well, I got a copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and a Latin Vocabulary building book. By the time I hit senior year, I think I’d had the SAT 6 times total – 3 in middle school, 3 in high school. I was pretty blase’ about it. :-)</p>

<p>MomofThree: I can remember my scores from the early 80’s because I still have the College Board SAT report from the last time I took them, in my files. My son used it as his metric – he wanted to do better than me. :-)</p>

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<p>I went to a tiny all girls Catholic school on the upper east side, class of '74. A- student, 1300 SATs. I forget Subject test scores. Very traditional curriculum. No APs. No athletics. We took ballet instead!! In senior year, took all academic subjects at a near-by college. What a mistake! Was woefully unprepared for upper levels courses at NYU. Applied to Georgetown, NYU and Alfred of all places. Was a double legacy at g-town but was denied. Apparently, GC never got the application in on time - a drunk. Scholarship at NYU and Alfred, though. Regents scholarship. too. HAd to go to Columbia for grad school, though to get a job!</p>

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<p>OK, all of you with better memories for test scores made me pull out the box of high school/college papers. I found the PSAT score report (650 V, 650 M good enough for commended) and the GRE (720 V 690 M) but no SAT. If you took the SAT you took it once because the GCs said it was an apptitude test and that you couldn’t study for it. Never met anyone who took the ACT. Never heard of SAT IIs or APs.
Top suburban high school in the Seattle area. Number 15 out of nearly 500 (did find the transcript) Never heard of AP classes. The idea of padding one’s resume to look good for colleges never occured to anyone. I was student council officer, did significant volunteer work, various clubs.
One girl in my class went to Yale (uncle taught there). One went to Harvard. Four or five to Stanford/CalTech/MIT. THe rest were pretty evenly divided. The ones who’s Dads had been laid off from Boeing went to CC or jobs. (Remember Boeing laid off tens of thousands in the early 70’s) The ones who’s Dads were still employed went to state schools or a few local private schools. It was a different universe…</p>

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<p>F, R or HM? Couldn’t be HM, not coed yet … my husband was Class of 72 at R so that would be a wild coincidence (though for some reason I thought that wasn’t coed yet at that point either … or maybe it was just split campuses) … and I/he had relatives at F where most of my close friends were in the later 70s …</p>

<p>Feel free to PM me if it’s getting too personal :slight_smile: !!!</p>

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<p>dragon: Yeah, it was a different world. My sweetie’s family never even talked about college – they are to this day still unabashedly blue collar, to the point that they actually use “white collar” as a pejorative. My sweetie was never told about the SAT in HS, and seem to have been “tracked” into just graduating. That he is now a very successful senior software engineer for a well-known silicon valley company is a testament to his skill and focus. He is entirely self-taught.</p>

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<p>whose, not who’s Gee, I can’t believe I did that twice!</p>