I like College Navigator because you can compare up to four schools side-by-side.
Welcome @svcamom! I’m sure your DS will improve his score. The majority of of test takers improve their scores the second time around. There are only a few weekends left before our 2018s sit for the PSAT. Got to motivate them to practice some between now and then.
Thanks for the welcome ! My son’s goal is to get a really high score to try to get into Stevens Institute of Technology.
I on the other hand would love for him to be a NMS/NMF !
Has anyone else attended a back-to-school night? I’m not even sure that’s a “thing” everywhere. For S’s school, the parents get to follow their student’s schedule and spend 10 minutes with each teacher (as a group). I found it pretty interesting. He likes all his teachers this year and I was impressed as well. Two of his AP teachers (APUSH and AP Lang) are actually AP test graders, so it seems they should know all the “secrets” of getting 4’s and 5’s. We’ll see if this actually translates into S getting those scores!
I’ve told him to start thinking about which teachers he’ll want LoR’s from and I think he has a strong group to choose from.
DD just started school Tuesday and back to school night isn’t until Sept. 29. I always assumed that back to school night was a ritual everywhere in the U.S.
Our’s is Monday night, we do the same thing since I have a ds18 and ds20 DH and I will both go and report back to each other.
@snoozn My school had their back-to-school night last night, but we did not attend. The way your DS’s school does it is pretty much identical to the way we do it.
Ds school does a back to school night every year. Did ours about 2 weeks ago. Love meeting all the teachers! Getting nervous about the Psat coming up. D would have missed the cutoff by one based on lat years score. Hoping she makes it this year!
Ours is the 19th…in the past we followed the students schedule this year they are changing it up and it will just be a drop in open house. I liked following the schedule it was good to see how the day goes and nice to see the parents of the other kids in class.
I’m looking forward to meeting ds18’s AP Psychology teacher. I’m sure he already think I am “that” mom. They had a 10 question quiz the end of the first week of school. It was an online test so it was scored immediately. The computer said he missed two T/F questions. DS looked up the answers in the text, high lighted them and showed them to the teacher to prove he had given the correct answers. The teacher then told him that he was aware of the problem and that it was a department test and the department had just decided to give everyone 10 extra points to make up for the problem. So my son that got all the answers correct was given a 90 and kids that actually missed two questions could have gotten 110. This seemed really crazy to me. I emailed the teacher for clarification thinking surely that DS was misunderstanding what was being said to him. The teacher never replied to my email but did change his grade to 100.
@3scoutsmom: Funny my D16 just scored a 20 on a 5 question computerized AP Psych quiz that they had 5 minutes to complete. She had started the quiz and finished 2 questions when the teacher reset the quiz, it dumped her and another student all the way out and they had to log back on, by the time they got back into the quiz there was 48 seconds to finish…when she and the other student spoke to the teacher about it they were basically told “too bad, so sad”, if she let them retake it she would have to let the entire class retake it. Not happy.
@labegg stuff like this makes me so mad! I’d fight it tooth and nail! It’s just unfair and can have financial consequences. DS has pretty much settled one UTD as his #1 pick (of course this could change at any moment) and if he doesn’t make NM then he’ll be in the running for their AES scholarships that take class rank and GPA into consideration. Kids should get the grade they earned but I don’t want them to miss out on a scholarships because of technical glitches or teacher incompetence! In our highly competitive school on test in on class can mess up your class rank.
This is not the first time we have had issues with “technology” at our high school. D16 had regular problems with computerized daily quizzes for geometry. We finally told her to write all of her answers on paper and whenever there was a discrepancy she would submit the paper to the teacher…oddly her quiz average “miraculously” went up. The school districts need to ensure that the technology works and that the teachers and students really understand how to employ it.
I’ve also seen this technology error take place. In my AP Chem class, we were instructed to do our diagnostic test on an app called Socrative. Those who did not have a phone or preferred the paper test were given a hard copy of the test. The problem that eventually surfaced with the app was that you had to enter the answer exactly as it was typed in by the teacher, the only exception being capitalization. A question was considered incorrect if it is not, pretty much, completely similar. I believe this same programming issue takes place on Quizlet as well. Anyway, I decided to take the paper out of preference and went through it without many problems. As I went to turn it in, the teacher graded it right then and there. I had a 13/19 on the test, while those who were on the app were getting an average of 10 - 14 questions right. Our teacher said for those on the app, he will have to go over their answers and check them. This test wasn’t graded as it was merely to see what we remember from Chemistry last year. I honestly thought it was a weird reversal. I had taken the hard copy of the test and received my actual score almost immediately, while those on the app received a low score likely because they did not enter their answers exactly as the teacher had.
@3scoutsmom I totally agree with you that GPA matter and I also wanted to fight for my DD’18 when she had incompetent teachers. My DD’18 doesn’t want me to write emails or contact her teachers cause I did this once when she was 9th grade (her math teacher gave her 0% for her entire summer homework over 150 questions because she wants to save paper and write the questions in double column and use double sides and it’s too much trouble for her to grade. After my email to the teacher, she started to publicly embarrass and pick on my DD .)
Every year my DD’18 had at least one teacher that’s incompetent and drive me crazy. Her fist year was Math teacher pick on her (but she still end up with A-), her English teacher going through divorce therefore no time to post grades, her Bio teacher just read off PowerPoint from another teacher and can’t explain any questions; second year her Chem teacher has young children with lots problems and always late for first period class and not in the best mood in the morning, math teacher is good but extremely strict, won’t run up 89.3% (was 91% before final. This year she is taking 4 APs, we were hoping to have solid teachers but it’s only 2nd week, my daughter only told me her AP Physics teacher can’t teacher, he is just like her first Bio teacher read off PowerPoint. She just asked me tonight that why people want to be a teacher when they can’t teacher (the exact words were why my science teachers don’t know how to teach, and why they want to be a teacher?)
at my s’s HS, it is small, but they never know who’s parent we are, it is a very general and brief open school night.
Not sure what made someone think a post about 9/11 would fly on this thread, but just…no.
@3scoutsmom , my son isn’t looking at those colleges that give merit, but I am ! 
@svcamom good for you! I a firm believer in having the money talk early and often! I also cautioned my kids to look at travel and living costs and how colleges handle APs.
D came home from school today with a Fall 2016 PSAT/NMSQT Student Guide, as well as a Fall 2016 PSAT/NMSQT Practice Test #2 booklet. Looks like the Oct 19th PSAT is almost upon us!