@CT1417 I think it’s important to reach the 75th percentile on very selective schools too. Son17 has 2 on his list that he is closer to 60th than 75th. With his other schools of interest he is over 75th. The 2 where he falls short are going to be tough for him to get into, but maybe not impossible. Our school regularly sends kids to school there, and he is in the range of accepted students there, but right on the intersection on the Naviance graph. I think he will apply to one of them Early Decision and the other EA. He really doesn’t have any true hooks, and being an average normal white kid from the burbs is not super compelling these days.
** national society of honors scholars ** = scam. Basically you pay some cash so you can list some useless "honor’ on your resume. Ya, no thanks. I’ll save that $75 so I can pay for 1/4 of a text book in college
** summer reading** son17 only has to read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. He is not taking AP Lit, he just stayed with honors lit again. 2 AP classes are Stats and Gov I think. All the rest honors.
There would be no way my son would want to take AP Lit. He likes reading, not a fan of the teachers.
@ynotgo, what you are saying about the UC system vs. policies of individual campuses makes sense. I assume this explains the somewhat different responses my S and H got at Berkeley vs. Santa Cruz when asking essentially the same question.
I still wish there were more clarity in how UC and individual campuses communicate about various policies at different levels. The response to my email didn’t even mention the admission by exam policy (even though I asked about it explicitly) … it’s as if it’s a policy that don’t want to completely acknowledge having (even though it is right there on their website).
My S does have some concerns similar to yours re: ability to double major or take classes across colleges (or switch majors) and he’s finding that large public universities are less flexible about these things in general (which is understandable but also an undesirable quality in a school). One thing that’s frustrating is that UCSC seemed much more flexible about things like that, even though they seem less flexible about the complex admissions requirements.
After paying $150+ plus college level Chemistry book for DS to prep for Science Bowl I found out older versions are good enoug and costs much less! A:-) I guess we can’t blame kids taking that rout.
@CT1417 That’s interesting about only being able to take one of the AP English classes. I’ve noticed a number of schools on our list offer the same course equivalent for Lit & Lang, so it might not be much of a loss! S took Lang and will take Lit, but depending on his school choice it may be pointless to sit the test.
@CaucAsianDad Hmmm I understand the logic of “progress through subject areas”. I just don’t want the drama my D creates around math… Well, she listens to her counselor better than her parents and she looks pretty determined, so we’ll see. She was actually flattered that her counselor thought she could tackle AP Calc.
@eandesmom I don’t know the final grade (probably B), but she survived Pre-Calc. She scored 16 out of 24 on the final. It doesn’t sound so good, but the class average was 9. Unfortunately teacher doesn’t curve. A sophomore girl in the class got the highest score of 22.
@HiToWaMom I would actually pay more attention to the admission criteria for target schools and requirements for the degree. According to the counselor’s logic, Dd should take cal 2, but in no way shape or form will cal 2 ever be required for her major. Cal 1 isn’t even required. (Cal is suggested by only 1 school’s admission page.) She is taking stats and not even hesitating. (And this is a student who excels in math. She just hates it and has zero desire to take it.)
@Mom2aphysicsgeek She wants to study history and women’s studies so she won’t be needing math for the degree at all. Maybe I should talk to her once again if she is really sure about AP Calc. I think her (and the counselor’s) reasoning is that it just simply looks better on the transcript.
@flatKansas Apparently some number of kids at our school take AP Lang in 11th and if they get a 4+ on the test come July, drop out of AP Lit. It’s the same credit for both at most UCs apparently. There is a dual-enrollment English class that they take instead in 12th, and that one may count as a different course.
DS still plans to take both AP Englishes (more course rigor), but he’ll decide which tests to actually sit for in April/May based on where he ends up deciding to go.
Well, apparently they don’t always communicate amicably. Academic politics and all that…
Last year, the UC Berkeley Faculty Senate voted that they wanted admissions to take LoRs into consideration. So, Berkeley admissions put up a web page saying that students could optionally send one LoR from a teacher. Apparently there was a big pushback from the other UC campuses. They said if Berkeley looks at LoRs, we will have to also and we don’t have the resources for that. And, they expressed equity concerns about LoRs from high-income vs. low-income schools. Berkeley ended up running a “pilot project” where they randomly told about 20% of applicants that they could send an LoR. It’s still not clear what Berkeley will do about LoRs this year, but it is clear that they got the adcoms at the other UCs upset with them.
@2kidsinky Thank you for the Barron’s book recommendation. Dd and I went to the library this morning and they had a copy of that book and another (I can’t remember the name) .We went though every school they had listed and came up with 4 more for her to research more throughly. We started off with 12, but quickly elimated many. (One school we looked at the book being used for a 500 level French class and d said no way bc it was written on such a low level that she can’t imagine why it would be used for a grad level course. Reed. Oh my, our expected contribution is $15,000 more than most other schools!)
But 4 more is better than zero.
I also made the decision this morning to email The Language Flagship and ask what they recommended for students who want to study Russian and live OOS or cannot afford their Russian flagship programs. No idea if they will respond, but I thought there was nothing to lose.
@HiToWaMom, I agree with Mom2aphysicsgeek about the math. For your D’s potential major pathway, statistics will probably be more useful than Calc. My D15, who is currently majoring in anthropology, Spanish, and minoring in poverty studies (with an emphasis on gender and race studies), took up to calc 3 in HS. She really needs statistics for the types of studies and evaluations she is currently doing. The calc B/C test score basically meant that she tested out of required math at the college she’s at, but she isn’t using it at all.
I am still very behind on the comments, but in two weeks my son, husband and I are going to the grand canyon and then heading to san Diego and checking out the University of San Diego. I read some where that says we could stay on campus since he is coming for a visit. Has anyone heard this?
About continuing in sequence (math, language, english, etc.):
DS is dropping Spanish after Spanish 4, even though his school offers AP Spanish. He’s always done well with languages, and I think it would be better off sticking with Spanish for one more year, but he’s just not interested and wants to spend his time pursuing other goals. It’s his choice and he’s definitely taking other rigorous courses in its place (probably equally hard or harder to get a good grade in the classes he’s taking in lieu of Spanish, though they’re not AP classes; some are DE though).
DS is taking AP Lit senior year after not taking an AP Lang junior year (apparently the school’s policies about who was allowed to take which English classes changed in some way last year that thwarted his plans… I think it’s just as well as he was pretty loaded with other AP classes as it is).
I have heard that a lot of colleges want to see calculus (and prefer it to AP Stats if both are available and the student only takes one). But, I assume this is not true for all colleges. A colleague in Georgia has a son thinks he didn’t get into Georgia Tech because he took AP Stats instead of AP Calc, but that’s a tech school (where calc is more important than for students pursuing humanities majors at liberal arts schools) and also who knows for sure if the student is right about the reasons he didn’t get in. But, when DS spoke to a college counselor, she indicated that selective colleges want to see calculus, so maybe that’s where some of the guidance counselors’ suggestions are coming from.
@srk2017 , the older version of popular college textbooks are sometimes free online. For example, current edition is 17th, when 15th edition is free online --One trick I learned when D was preparing for a contest last year.
@fun1234 – Have fun at the Grand Canyon! Visited there a couple of years ago and loved everything about it! Did not realize that people make reservations a year in advance, but totally lucked out by calling multiple times/day and snagging a room cancellation at El Tovar. It was wonderful seeing the canyon ‘glow’ at night.
@262mom --my older son stopped Spanish upon completion of Spanish IV in 11th grade. It was a struggle throughout and I felt that four years was enough, even though AP was offered.
Agree that Tech schools would view Stats as Math ‘light’. Younger son planned to take AP Stats as an elective with multi-variable as his math, but was bounced from Stats class due to scheduling.
@SincererLove – to follow up on your comment about older versions on-line, wanted to add that older versions are often available for ridiculously low prices, in case a student really wants a hard copy. (Says she who discovered this the difficult way by ordering out-of-date version for college son. Old textbook was fine but it did not have the needed on-line access code…so, he ended up with both the old and the new!)
But be very, very careful about older editions. Even if they’ve only changed slightly, they can be changed in important ways—so, for example, the textbook that I use for the main intro class I teach regularly changes the problems in the exercises in small but meaningful ways (usually in ways that improve them, I must say) in their every two-to-three year cycle of updated editions. If your kid is being asked to do problems, say, 3–8 in a particular chapter, and the textbook changes the exercises like this, then they may automatically get them wrong simply because they’re not actually doing the right problems.
I teach undergrad statistics and have encountered the same issue as @dfbdfb with problems changing from one edition to the next, which messes up homework assignments/grading. Sometimes it can be very hard to tell if you have the right edition if you order online/used (I once encountered a situation where the ISBN was the same but somehow the edition was still different - a Canadian or UK edition or something, but with completely wrong problems… )
As a parent, I also had a similar problem when trying to get a cheaper version of APUSH text for S… ended up paying a lot to buy a gently used copy at the campus bookstore just to make sure it was the correct edition.
