Chance a Vermonter!

Faline2
Fri, 16 Mar 2012 10:45:37 +0000

I like your extra-curriculars and “real” jobs. You need to take your classes seriously re grades, so make sure to stay focused. You also have advantages over my sons…whose entire testing history went to admissions offices. You can take tests more often and select which scores go out.

Testing matters so spend the money to take tests at least twice. My eldest gained 200 points when he was close to his 18th birthday. He just started to care a lot about his scores at the last minute and started practice testing and waking up.

It is true that most students at a school like Vandy finished AP Calc or its equivalents in their local schools but I think you should focus on actually mastering your math each year so make sure to study it well. Not everyone is ready for accelerated math early. Our local district’s gifted track pushes everyone to be done with Geometry in 8th grade which I did in 10th grade. Not all minds are ready at that middle school age.

But don’t let anyone get you off track on math. Insist on progressing and make studying a priority…seek out help and make sure you get every month’s lessons.

There are ways to get AP Calc in your local community college in late summer for instance.

Even the SAT Subject Test Level 2 which most serious students going into sciences or engineering take doesn’t get deeply into AP Calc.

Be proactive. Buy the SAT Subject Test book Level 2 and recognize that most students at highly selective schools mastered the math on that test. Talk to someone on your math faculty about how to get you to that point by the end of your junior year in high school. A good score on that is a high score (most people make high scores) because the group of kids taking it are self selected “going to study sciences in college or applying to highly selective colleges in general”. They take the test because they expect it to be an asset on their applications. Our sons used it in place of AP Calc scores.

We didn’t have good AP Calc instruction in our district. So our kids focused on doing well on this test.

You can also take the ACT which is broken into subjects and buy the ACT red book and start learning that math in that section.

If you are interested in Vet Sciences fields, you will want to do all in your own power to land in college on equal or near equal footing with your classmates. So you have to take control and master material. Don’t be one of those young men who gets washed out just because he came underprepared. You can do it.