Parents of the HS Class of 2018 (Part 1)

Parents of HS Class of 20xx
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Car Inventory: 2004 Odyssey with 225,000 miles… we are no longer doing repairs last piece the mechanic said we did not need we just ripped off. D20 calls it Clunky 1. 2011 Volvo s-80 with 101,000 was “new to us” 3 years ago. Still paying on it. 2007 Sienna with 110,000 miles gifted to D18 last year by her aunt when aunt got a Tahoe. D20 calls this one Clunky 2 but it really doesn’t clunk…name is more because D20 is embarrassed her sister’s car is a van, sister knows it is way better than nothing. On deck is my mom’s 2009 Camry also around 100,000 which we are replacing the Odyssey with. Dad has dementia so we told him the Odyssey is broken and keep the Camry at our house and mom drives what his CRV. They are OOS and we are trying to keep the plates on the Odyssey so we need a full day at the registry which has not happened yet. Plan is when Volvo paid for Clunky 2 will go,

Graduation party: Graduation on a Monday night in June 4 ( Catholic school and the schools have assigned nights at the Cathedral so we have known the date since freshman year). Daughter and 3 friends are going to Disney June 10th instead of a big party. Will have a family party ( which is 40 people right there) in the summer when her cousins are out here.

Ranking: School does not rank. This upset me as a freshman parent, very happy about it now. Very competitive and only 100 girls in the class so the top 40 are probably all within a hair of each other ranking would have been a disaster.
D20 goes to another school and they do rank. It is not going to pretty for her as she is an A/B student in college level not honors and will not have AP access. There are about 240 in her class. Will be taking that into consideration as we look at schools.

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I think I got you all beat with a 2003 Odyssey at 336,000 miles. :slight_smile:

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No ranking here either. And no weighting of classes. So anyone that has a certain GPA can graduate with honors, no matter which classes they took, which I love!

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I have asked my sons school to quit ranking. I’ll need to go to the school board and central office. They don’t understand the damage to a class of 65 kids, where top 10% is 7 kids. Plus, colleges will consider a kid without rank for a top scholarship, but when that ranking is released, they aren’t eligible for the same Merit.

As for GPA, I think only academic classes should be included. Then people can take what they want and not worry whether electives are honors or AP.

@birdie3 hahaha…yep, you got me.

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@ChattaChia of course the flip side of that is the huge suburban HS with lots of kids taking a ridiculous amounts of AP classs such that my daughters 4.0uw and 4.46w leaves her 54 out of 750. At a lot of smaller schools she arguably could have been top 3% or better.

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@birdie3 Not an Odyssey, but still a Honda - H drives a clean 2004 Element one owner, 410,000 miles. He loves it so much we have a 2005 backup in the garage ready to go.

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Our school doesn’t rank, either. Small school (<75 seniors) and they don’t want the kids to have the added pressure and fixation on grades. Plus, our school doesn’t have any flexibility in the curriculum. Everyone takes the exact same courses all four years with the exception of choosing their foreign language.

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Re:ranking - I sure think it would be helpful if all schools used the same standard scale/system and there was some common core/collegiate track (I dont mean to dredge up a political hornets nest), but I suppose that gets into some state/local/individual rights issues!

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so much news for everyone today, it’s hard to keep up! But congrats to @SnowflakeDogMom for being done! And to @LOUKYDAD for the interview, that’s really impressive.

Graduation party…my parents are going to host a joint party for my niece who’s graduating college and my D at their condo club house. They felt really badly that at age 87 they don’t have the energy to travel from CT to D.C. for my niece’s graduation and then to AL for my D’s graduation, so we’re all travelling to them. I think they should cut themselves some slack! Turns out that they’re using the grad party as a good excuse for a big extended family party/reunion so it’ll be great to see lots of my aunts/uncles/cousins there too. It’s very casual and we always have a no gift policy (except cards as long as they don’t contain any money), which I love. It’s so nice just to celebrate with people and not have anyone worry or feeling badly if money is tight.

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We do not live near family, we will not be having a graduation party. We are planning a big family trip, in fact, we really need to make a decision on where and when soon. It seems unlikely that our eldest DD2016 will be able to go, she is planning a summer class (the dreaded college course; Organic Chemistry) and that just doesn’t feel right; going on holiday without her…

We bought a new car just after christmas, a 2017 Ford Fusion. All of our cars are over 10 years and 125k miles. We were holding our breath waiting for one to breakdown, it was time. I have to say after driving the new car, which is technically my husband’s, when I get back in my old Toyota I feel like I am driving a Flintstones car.

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Bought D18 a 2015 Nissan Rogue during Thanksgiving break. She was driving a 2002 Xterra with +240k miles. A 5 speed nonetheless. More for my peace of mind with her driving +3 hours or more to college. Now if she could just decide which college…

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@labegg – I don’t think there’s any issue with the various rights when it comes to creating the transcript. The reported HS transcript should be standardized nationwide (they effectively are with the various code words in the class names but it’s not explicit). Plus, you basically have one computer (the HS) reporting to another computer (the college), so standardization would help. For example, instead of having to pick apart a class name, the computerized report would contain:

  1. The area (algebra, trig, calc, biology, music, etc.)
  2. The level of difficulty in a 1-10 scale (on-level, honors, advanced, AP )
  3. Actual grade from 0-100
  4. Grade distribution for all the kids who took the class

Item #1 could be broken up into two pieces: Field (math, etc.) and Topic (algebra, calc, etc.).

Something like that would allow colleges to quickly sort through at least the transcript part of the flood of applications. I don’t know how AOs do it today, with all the weirdo names used for classes. I barely understand D18’s transcript!

Edit: it was goofy for D18 to have to enter her transcript several times to different colleges and the common app. She had the UGA GPA system, the common app system for USC, etc. All she should need to do is tell her school’s computer to send the report to the college’s/common app’s computer! It would take a fraction of a second and contain no errors.

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Lots of good news!

I knew my DD would not be anywhere near the top 10 going into HS - she was already behind because, though she did honors Algebra 1 as an 8th grader, her Catholic school didn’t offer Spanish in 8th grade and it threw her off the honors language track. She couldn’t even take honors Spanish this year (reserved for juniors), because it is assumed seniors are taking AP and she didn’t feel ready for it. So she’s in college prep Spanish 4. She is doing well - around the top 10 percent - but not the top 10.

The school has done some tweaks, however, that I am please with (yeah, it shocks me, too!). Now there is an honors Algebra I offered to freshmen (my younger daughter’s in it) so, if you want to double math in sophomore year, you could still take Calculus senior year. An honors diploma does not require physics specifically, just an advanced science and anatomy counts. It works out for my younger daughter, but she, too, will never be close to top 10. Respectable, I’m sure, but nothing near the top.

I’ve found I am much more relaxed about what my younger daughter takes. She will not double math sophomore year - she is strong in math but she feels it will be too much - and will NOT take honors chem and honors bio in the same year like my older daughter did. I guess I learned a few things from my older DD, that it’s not a race but a marathon, and that study halls are beautiful.

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@burghdad Not sure I follow your comment. Was it related to not counting non-academic courses?

I don’t have a problem with honors or AP getting higher points, it seems logical that mastering harder content would be impactful. Of course, while that seems logical, I could see someone having a problem with it since an excellent student without AP would not be able to compete for top rank. That is another good argument to quit ranking. Not everyone is AP/Honors bound, but are excellent students with excellent grades. At a big school in your situation, your DD is still top 10%.

I personally don’t like “fluff” grades propping up a GPA, and we see that sometimes. In theory, AP/Honors should out weigh that, but only if there’s enough of them. I will say I see a benefit to those things I call “fluff,” things like dance, music, theater…they teach valuable life skills and make school interesting. So I wouldn’t want them to go away. I guess my sensitivity to it is that my Son attends a performing arts school.

At son’s school, he only has access to 4 academic AP classes; 2 Junior year, 2 Senior year, all other academic classes are honors - they have no “regular” classes. There are a couple AP in dance, art and music - but they wouldn’t be available to everyone. So everything else being equal, a person in one of the AP available majors at son’s HS could take the lead with a class my son couldn’t take and had no equivalent offering in his major to take. To compound that, AP is worth more than Dual Enrollment at son’s school - so he couldn’t even offset that additional AP with a DE class.

They take 8 classes a year, with up to 4 being arts related. As an example: this year he has Honors English, AP Calculus, AP Environmental Science, Honors Government/Economics, Publications, Art of Technology (computer class), Sr. Project/Personal Finance, Library Aide (There were no other classes for him to take, that fit his schedule so he enrolled in CS II at the community college at night). He is a writing major. He only has 2 “arts” classes this year, but you could see how 4 “fluff” classes could really impact GPA.

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In our large PA public HS setting, D18 has been able to take multiple honors and AP while continuing in unweighted music and art classes. This choice has “cost her top 10 status”, but she has demonstrated better balance and collaboration which hopefully will help her in college/real world. This choice has also led to better mental health/less stress overall, but may keep her out of reach schools. She is still top 5% and will make the most of her college experience regardless of where she goes.
Fast forward to D21 who has taken on a very challenging/weighted course-load and is currently ranked 2/650. This has come with a huge increase in anxiety, decrease in socialization, and is 100% not worth it!
In our situation/school class rank does not help, it only hinders kids, even vals and sals. We had a kid with over 100%, gpa, 1560 sat who didn’t get into a particular honors program because she was ranked 17 where in the district next door kid with lower stats got in because school did not report rank.
I’m now committed to help our administration see the difficulties this system places on our kids, you could still calculate val/sal, report percentages to give context, but don’t penalize kids when it comes to honors or scholarships.
Even leaving it to the individual families to say my kid needs this information as a motivator or this causes anxiety that my kid can’t handle right now…stay tuned to how it shakes out.

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We probably won’t have a graduation party until the end of summer and might combine it with S’s birthday. We will see.

I had a strange dream, that my brother (the other musician in the family), came to S’s spring chorus concert and graduation ceremony, and that they then took a road trip to NOLA. LOL

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I guess I fall on the complete other side of the argument. As in life choices are made that impact outcomes and that is an important life skill. We are in Texas and rank is critical to admissions, and if #1 to a full year of tuition as well. Everyone knows the parameters of the situation and can plan accordingly. My DD18 is currently 8/721. She had to take 4 years of CTE classes for her engineering endorsement, and 1 year of band as well as 4 years of varsity athletics that were not weighted. This put her at a distinct disadvantage to the students who were not in athletics or arts and could add an additional AP class but this was her choice. She is making it up with 7 AP classes (some are single semester) senior year to help bring her up a bit. She would not give up any of her choices but also thrives on the challenge and is learning that she has to earn what she wants.
Our district is now going to change how they weight classes (and adding weight to DE) and will no longer report rankings until after junior year and then not publicly. I am glad all of mine will be out before that occurs because it leaves the students in limbo on where they stand. I firmly believe in transparency and competition but that is just my take.

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Competing priorities, right? Colleges say: we want you to take the most challenging courses, but be well rounded (arts classes?) and active in school, oh and by the way, ranked in the top 10%. Sometimes striving to meet one criteria is counter productive to the other. Like was said above, they can still figure out #1 and #2 without ranking anyone else, to identify the “who” for merit programs that are specifically Val/Sal oriented.

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@chattachia I think we are on the same page here. My point was that because my daughter like @MPT3D’s wanted to continue to take the unweighted Chorus and Chamber choir she could not take as many AP course and as such her ranking ends up being lower that the kids that forgo those type of classes to take 8 AP classes a year.

As you note its about schools talk about being well rounded and doing things you are passionate but then have some arbitrary cutoffs for honors admission or merit money based on class ranks etc.

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I am hopeful that colleges look at class rank in context, though. My D goes to a competitive magnet school. She isn’t in the top 10%, despite a 4.0 UW, 11 APs, plus several advanced foreign language classes, which are weighted. She loses the class rank game because of varsity swim, ironically the biggest time suck in her schedule. Class rank is not a perfect measurement, but neither are standardized test scores, or GPA, or heavily-edited essays. It needs to be looked at all together…here’s the magic word…holistically, to get the truest picture.