Google “Anxiety with High Function.” This condition is endemic at highly selective (and thus, highly competitive) schools and can lead to very unpleasant anxiety attacks. It is more common among girls, first-born, and some social and ethnic groups.
Learning coping mechanisms will pay big dividends in surmounting academic stress, and hopefully, life.
No tutor, no formal test prep. She took SAT’s twice, a year apart; and ACT in spring and fall. ACT superscored would have been 28 - the problem was that on a retake I think the highest subscore fell a point or so. Submitted both ACT’s to selective colleges. I couldn’t get her to spend more than about an hour or so on test prep for retakes, but there was other stuff going on in her life at the time (grandfather was dying of cancer). Didn’t matter in the end anyway She got accepted where she was meant to get accepted. (We are Californians and she was essentially a guaranteed admit to any of the less selective UC campus in any event – the world would not have come to an end if she had headed off to UCSB or UCSC the following fall)
Some kids are better at taking tests cold than others. My D is very smart - she was an early reader who was formally tested as gifted as a child, but she’s never done particularly well on standardized tests.
My son is a good test taker and scored right at the NM cutoff (so he was NM Finalist) when he took the PSAT cold (no prep, and first-time taker in 11th grade) He took the SAT cold, once, in March of his junior year, and scored mid 1400’s – and never bothered taking it again.
My daughter did much better in college than my son. My son is very smart and capable, its just that standardized tests don’t really measure the qualities needed to perform well at college very well. For example, there is no section which tests procrastination, but that is a huge difference between son and daughter — son would wait until the very last minute to begin an assignment, daughter would start work the day it was assigned.
I don’t think all the prep in the world would have gotten my daughter’s scores a whole lot higher, because of the math part --my son helped her prep for math GRE (he had a perfect math GRE score and worked for a test-prep company teaching GRE) - and I don’t think her score came up past about 80th percentile or so. She got into just about every grad program she applied to, including a couple of Ivies. At this point she has turned down spots at U. of Chicago 3 times, as she applied and was accepted to two different grad programs there, as she wasn’t quite sure the direction she wanted to go. In the end it always came down to money. She may not be able to score 99th percentile in math like her brother, but there’s never been any problem with the concept that $40 or $60 or $80 thousand dollars is a lot more than $10 or $20 thousand – a math concept which does seem elusive on CC every spring.
I think that’s because it only works if the applicant has something special that stands out to the ad com, that would lead them to want to look beyond the numbers. They don’t have time to dig through the weeds to figure out on their own what makes the applicant “special”, so the application has to really highlight those qualities – and it can be hit and miss.
My D applied EA to Chicago and was absolutely ecstatic the day she received the deferral – she had assumed she would be rejected. She had not targeted colleges and decided to come up with an angle - it was the other way around, she had a lopsided and unusual academic profile, could identify her two most “marketable” strengths, and on the more selective end, aimed for colleges that seemed like they would particularly value those strengths. And that can be somewhat counter-intuitive – if a college has a reputation for a particular strength in an area, that college may also have plenty of other applicants to fill that niche – so the key is not to aim for the “best” college for that strength, but instead aim for the college where that applicant may well be one of the “best” in the applicant pool for that particular niche ability or interests.
I think athletes understand this – they are able to figure out whether they are competitive for Div I or whether they are better off to aim for Div III schools, and they target their applications appropriately.
Oh how I wish there was a test that tested procrastination…big problem with two of my three kids! And while I do think the SAT’s and ACT’s are decent indicators of success in college, they definitely aren’t everything. I think studies show that GPA is much more indicative of success in college, and it sounds like that is the case with your daughter for sure. She sounds not only bright but also like she is a hard worker. The combination is sure to make her a success.
I agree that the ad coms don’t have the time to sift through all applications as holistically as they would like to and that someone must really stand out to get that deeper read. However, I do think the top schools must attempt to maintain their stats and will make sure the class that they accept more or less has the average test scores they are looking for. But there are always outliers that make it in for some special quality that pops out. That’s great for your daughter that she stood out.
I’m also glad your daughter didn’t stress herself out too much with test prep, didn’t kill the test, and still did so well. I hope that reassures some of the students that are reading this thread that they do not have to be defined by the SAT or ACT.
My middle child is my child that doesn’t procrastinate. She is graduating high school this coming Thursday and is the valedictorian of her class. People ask me all of the time if it was stressful for her and what it must have been like living with such an over-achiever. My response is always the same…she is no brighter than my other two, and probably no brighter than many of the kids in her high school. She made it look easy. The secret for her was her time management skills. She always started her homework as soon as she got home and started longer term projects ahead of time. She never really let herself get too stressed either. She just plowed through and wasn’t too hard on herself. If she felt she studied enough, she went to bed. I’m not sure there is any test in the world that could test for this quality.
As I type, my valedictorian is tucked away in bed…her brother is at the dining room table still studying for his math final. Her sister, who is taking an on-line summer college class, is up in her room trying to finish an essay that is due. Her brother and sister procrastinated which continues to cause them stress because they are trying to do well, but can’t seem to stop their self-destructive procrastinating behavior.
@collegemomjam Your middle D sounds a lot like my D (only). Also valedictorian, and I can also count on one hand the number of nights in high school she was up to midnight.
Her steps to less-stress success (for her):
What also helped with the stress was that D didn’t have her heart set on one particular school, and her list of colleges was a decent mix of safeties, matches, and reaches. She was happy where she got in, not crushed about where she didn’t, and just finished up a very successful freshman year at Cal. BTW, wait listed at U of Chicago. Classmate right behind her is actually going to U of C in the fall - took 10 or 12 AP’s, valedictorian, and is absolutely burned out right now.
@Undercrackers sounds like your daughter is really on the right path. She will achieve success because of, not in spite of, the fact that she knows herself and won’t allow herself to get too stressed. I really think that is so important and something that a lot of over-achieving students and people in general are missing. Someday, when they all have jobs, they may not need to know a lot of the rigorous academics that they learned in college…but they will have deadlines and need to learn how to deal with stress. This is something I need to work on with my other two children because they stress themselves out way too much and it’s counter productive. Having straight A’s in hard classes means nothing if you can’t handle stress well.
Good luck to your D! She sounds like a role model to me.
My daughter was not a math lover, but thought Calc AB was a breeze. Her school didn’t offer BC. I’m sure that would have been a different story. If the OP’s daughter did well in pre-calc, she really should take calculus. Most colleges will expect it. If she enjoys math, she can take stats and other courses once she gets to college.