<p>momsings - that is really COOL!</p>
<p>OH MY momsings, that’s great!
My D. does some tutoring. $10/hour. 
A good start though. </p>
<p>@Suzy, my d. is just like yours - not really a STEM kid, even though she’s good at math and loved biology at least. It’d be so much easier if she was a STEM person.</p>
<p>D’12 had to get her transcript today to take to college orientation tomorrow, which got me thinking about D’15 and her class rank, so I called her GC and was told that our new school policy for the district is that no rank will be calculated until the student’s senior year. I think that is a dumb rule for several reasons, including the fact that knowing your rank is important in determining whether you have a chance of getting into various schools (like ones where you have to be top 10% generally etc). For example, at our HS you generally have to be ranked about 30th or better to get into our best state flagship. It would be nice to know where you stand during 10th and 11th grade as you make plans.</p>
<p>I agree with you TV4caster. If a school is going to rank, then they should let the kids know what that rank is. I’m glad that for the freshman at my D’s school, they don’t find out until September of their sophomore year. At the same time, I wish the school didn’t rank at all, because I can see it starting to become a big focus already. I guess competition can be good, but not when it overshadows that whole learning thing.</p>
<p>Our school only ranks by decile, top 10%, 20%, etc. No val or sal. Also doesn’t weight GPA at all.</p>
<p>I think that’s a good way to go.</p>
<p>I was sort of clueless with my older son and didn’t even think about rank until his junior year. It is something you can ask the counselors about but it isn’t widely know or hugely talked about at the school. This year, there were 6 vals.</p>
<p>The math/science magnet D’12 graduated from not only doesn’t rank (not even in deciles) it doesn’t even calculate GPAs. They send transcripts with grades, but no calculated GPA. (There is a GPA calculated for internal purposes, but there’s no guarantee that any given admissions office will view the transcript the same way the school does.)</p>
<p>Our local HS has a complicated formula for calculating weighted GPA, and does calculate class rank. There are honors for various class ranks (honor roll, deans list) and an honor for those who graduate with the highest weighted GPA (which would be like Val, except that there are so many of them! Last year, the top 2.5% of the class received that honor). Basically, that hides that the grading system is fairly easy for the most academically inclined kids.</p>
<p>All this talk of driving and APs is timely to me, as D15 got back her Human Geography score (5, yay!) the same day she obtained her drivers permit. As a reward she got to drive for about an hour on the way to drop her at away camp. She was very calm and composed as she drove on the interstate, in stark contract to me!</p>
<p>TV4caster – I’m sure you could ask your GC whether your kid is in or near top 10%. Anyway, I don’t think that colleges view top decile rank as a sharp cutoff. They care more about whether an applicant was successful in a challenging curriculum and/or distinguished themselves in some other way.</p>
<p>D2 got her permit yesterday too! Very exciting time. I took her to drive around the hs parking lot this morning- thinking it would be quiet. We timed it nicely as cross country was finishing and the cheer leaders were being dropped off for workouts. Some of her friends got to witness her first driving!! I had forgotten how stressful it is sitting beside a teen driver. </p>
<p>On ranking, our school system " does not rank" though Val and Sal are announced in April. Top 10 are highlighted in a nice brochure at baccalaureate. At graduation top 10% graduate first and have cords. Students graduating Magna cum laude etc are announced and again have special cords. So for a system that doesn’t rank it is pretty obvious who the top students are.</p>
<p>I also think the kids pretty much know who the top students are especially as the progress through the school. Our Sal/ Val, star student etc are never a surprise.</p>
<p>Hope all are enjoying the summer. We are heading to the beach next week for a softball tournament.I know there is another softball family on this thread, wonder if you will be in Panama City too? The following week D2 is taking Drivers ed. Then eek 2 weeks of summer hols left. I love the summer and don’t want it to end!</p>
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<p>LOL - it IS a leap of faith. isn’t it! One nice thing with my oldest - by the time he got his permit, he had pretty much been convinced for a year or so that we knew absolutely nothing. Once we put him behind the wheel, he was his sweet little, not so cocky, receptive to advice self that he had been when he was about 6. It was enough to get us in the car with him just to experience that gentler side we hadn’t seen enough of for a while!</p>
<p>Hi y’all! I’m new and need a break from the intensity of my D13’s college search so I thought I’d bounce over here to see what’s happening for my S15.</p>
<p>My S is within a couple weeks of applying for a drivers permit. He is brimming with excitement. I’m making an appointment now to have my extra gray hairs touched up. </p>
<p>He has finished Drivers Ed and had a short academic camp at our local medical school, sort of a career exploration thing. His comment afterwards was that being a Dr is kind of like being a car mechanic, except with cars there’s no chance of MRSA. Very insightful, this kid. </p>
<p>Anyway, he has about a month to spend burning up the Xbox and doing summer reading before school starts.</p>
<p>Hi Ezilyamused! Sounds like your S has a great sense of humor. 
Good luck on the D13 college search! (oops, forgot you’re here trying to get your mind off of it!)</p>
<p>Welcome Ezily!</p>
<p>Our HS ranks and I hate it! They already received their rank after the first semester-I think it puts too much pressure on the kids and it can also tempt some to take an easier path since even though they calculate W and UW the rank is based on UW and the local U offers a full tuition scholarship to the highest ranked student who accepts it.</p>
<p>I don’t know where she ranks after the full year but she must be top three and she will make herself crazy over this-when in the long run it is far more important she takes the classes and the difficulty level she needs to and also enjoys the other parts of her HS experience.</p>
<p>I’m cross-posting this from the 2012 thread, because y’all might find useful in the future:</p>
<p>Late last night a little CC bug whispered in my ear and sent me running to check D2012’s AP score report. When it arrived last week, I’d merely glanced at it to see this year’s scores and hadn’t fully vetted the whole report. Sure enough, this year’s report only showed this year’s scores.</p>
<p>This morning, I called College Board. It turns out that they only combine tests from different years into a single record if the data bubbled in by the kid matches perfectly. Even the smallest discrepancy (say, a home phone one year and a cellphone the other year in the optional contact info) can cause different years’ reports to be stored separately, even if all the other data matches.</p>
<p>In my D2012’s case, she had:
(1) bubbled sex=F in 2011 and sex=M in 2012
(2) put no phone number in 2011 and her cellphone in 2012 under the optional phone field.</p>
<p>The good news is that the friendly CB rep was able to correct the records (added phone to 2011, fixed sex in 2012) and put in a merge request. The request will take ~5 business days to process. Then a corrected report will be automatically sent by first class mail to our home address, the HS, and previously-requested recipients, free of charge. So D2012’s college should receive her updated scores within ~2 weeks.</p>
<p>So, as your kids take these tests in future years, remember to comb through their AP & SAT score reports and make sure all scores and personal data appear exactly as they should!</p>
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<p>That makes sense given your district’s policies. In our district though they only rank weighted GPAs. My argument there is that, if anything, it pushes kids to take even more rigorous courses, so why not give it out. I know my D would add an extra AP in a heartbeat if she thought it would boost her GPA to val or sal territory. She already is choosing AP Euro next year vs AP Human because it is supposedly harder and looks better to top colleges.</p>
<p>mihcal1 - thank you for the information! That is going to be very useful.</p>
<p>Welcome Ezilyamused!</p>
<p>I don’t think they need this in 9th grade. I know my daughter is going to make herself crazy about it and already tried to take some easier classes since she wants to be Number 1-our last Val got so worked up about protecting her rank by the time she got to college she couldn’t handle it anymore and had to withdraw.</p>
<p>I also think as you say our policy discourages taking harder classes.</p>
<p>I have seen this cause a lot of problems in my son’s class and think it is a terrible policy.</p>
<p>Pepper, I agree with you. My D’s school ranks with weighting, but it also has some negative consequences, i.e., kids loading up on AP’s in subjects that don’t really even interest them. I don’t want my D going down that road. She’ll have plenty of AP’s anyway, and it will of course be her choice, but I don’t want her loading up on them just for ranking purposes. I won’t know how she really feels about it until we learn her rank, but she’s already said she’d like to figure out a way to get in some art classes just because she’s interested and I support that.</p>
<p>I really wish we could get away from rankings, or do it by deciles or something more general.</p>
<p>Welcome Ezily!</p>
<p>We enjoy having S2 home this week after he was gone almost the whole month of June and the first week of July. He is leaving again tomorrow to staff a leadership camp. He had a great time hiking at the Philmont ranch in NM. After that he worked as camp staff and was offered to go back next summer as a sailing instructor (small sailing boats). It amazes me he wants to do it in this HOT weather we have! Camp staffs live in tents but they are allowed to bring fans and small refrigerators from home. Some boys even brought their xbox, PS3, flat screen TVs, couches etc. I guess why not. After all they are there up to 6 weeks long!</p>
<p>The following week he comes back and starts the Drivers Ed class. I have mixed feeling about this. When S1 started driving himself to school in junior year, it was nice but I did miss the one-on-one time in the car. I am just not ready for S2 to reach that milestone! :(</p>