<p>To clarify, annasdad made the comment about the relative difficulty of classes at IMSA vs Northwestern citing a comment from another parent, who wad citing his daughter. annasdad has no independent knowledge of that (but does know that IMSA classes are way more challenging than typical AP classes).</p>
<p>My older S attended a public HS math/science magnet. Placed directly into upper div math and graduate CS courses as a freshman at a T-10 school. Several of his APs were offered as one-semester courses and the teachers added significant difficulty as well (i.e, AP Stat was a one-semester, calculus based course, Calc BC was completed in one semester and the teacher kept going with more involved work, etc.) Average SAT was 2230, close to 50% of the class was NMSF. </p>
<p>Other S attended a selective admit, full IB on steroids program. You learn to swim or get out of the pool, and fast.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Having AP Statistics as a one semester course and adding use of calculus makes it like a typical university introductory statistics course for non-statistics majors. Much more worthwhile than a typical AP Statistics course.</p>
<p>Having all of Calculus BC as a one semester course makes it like MIT’s first semester freshman calculus course, which compresses what is typically a year of freshman calculus into one semester.</p>
<p>^^^Yup. We were really thankful he could do all of this at his HS vs. heading to college early. The upper-level electives were the same way (MV, DiffEq, Lin Alg, and various CS courses) – one semester, college-level courses. It was good preparation for the pace of college-level work, and MV and DiffEq problem sets were from math courses well-known for math on CC, so we were confident that S and his classmates were getting “the real thing.”</p>
<p>There were schools who knew and appreciated the kind of background that students from this school brought to the table.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, that school seems to be an exception – for every school that teaches advanced students university level material at a university level pace, there are likely numerous others which slow-pace AP courses, doing advanced students a disservice in teaching them less and giving them an inaccurate impression of what university level courses are like.</p>
<p>Probably many students who took a year-long non-calculus AP statistics course and a two year long AP calculus AB-BC sequence (unfortunately common these days) found actual university level math courses to be a shock in terms of how quickly students were expected to learn the material.</p>
<p>Annasdad,
My DS is mulling about IMSA. He is a smart guy ( not supersmart though ) and loves sports too. Are such kids minority at IMSA? I am not sure if he will thrive in only supersmart atmosphere. So, looking for some guidance !
Another question: Was your kid supersmart? If not, then, how did the transition to “inquiry based teaching” go for her? As a parent, I am quite ambivalent about it and don’t understand how kids can just “figure it out” without teaching them the concepts? Any advice is appreciated.</p>