I had a conversation with my son on the drive home from school and he said emphatically -Mom I’m done with standardized tests. If a school doesn’t think ive proved myself based on my SAT scores, GPA and success with a full IB program then I don’t want them too.
I told him I would look at the common data set and other data areas to see if I can find more info but I’m inclined to agree with him and to stop giving the college board more money.
Someone mentioned the AP history tests being like trivia contests and I couldn’t agree more. As a history major, it makes me so sad. No real college history class would be taught this way. All it serves to do is cram a lot of facts into their heads to be expelled and forgotten. It isn’t doing anything to foster a love or understanding of history.
@gallentjill I think the APUSH test was more about trends and it tested kids fairly. S19 probably learned more in his APUSH class than any other history class - tons of info, sure, but also how to write. It really was an amazing class. It’s the SAT US History test that is like Jeopardy. Quick! Revolutionary War Battles for $500!
Well, finals start today and the school year will be wrapped up by Friday. The APUSH kids don’t take a final. So, S19 will take math this morning and then, per tradition, the APUSH kids will all go out for pancakes together. lt’s a small school. 
S19 has spoken to two teachers who agreed to write LOEs. And he gave them the profile sheet he wrote. And he submitted an unofficial transcript request so that it can be sent home once final grades are in next week. Penn State and Pitt require self-reported grades so this will give him a jump on that. Better to get it now than during the scramble at the beginning of senior year.
Wow. The Common App opens in less than two months!
Oh, and @ninakatarina , I want to give my S19 that same writing prompt! He’d have a lot to express. 
It’s Election Day! Be sure to vote.
Yesterday we got an ad in the mail for…senior pictures. Aaaaaaah!!! MY CHILD IS ONLY NINE YEARS OLD. Everyone has lost track and they are all wrong and she is only 9 and this can’t be happening. I didn’t even open the ad. Baby steps…although I’m pretty sure those photos have to be done by the end of September or so, so there’s another summer project for us. Eeep.
@homerdog Why only send one sitting of your S19’s sparkly SAT scores? I’d send both sets…shows his >1500 score wasn’t a fluke. I am grateful that they do have the score select option because it definitely tamped down D19’s stress level taking it a second time. But heck, with your S’s scores I’d send the whole package. Good for him! He sounds like a very well-rounded kiddo.
@gallentjill I definitely feel like I’m the one going to college sometimes, yes. And I do think I’m having undue influence on D19’s college list, which has some overlap with my old list. Of course I’m going to put schools on there with which I have some familiarity…I guess it’s a starting point at least.
@ninakatarina That’s great to get the ideas flowing and writing underway! My D19 has been working this week on written rebuttals of 20 arguments for atheism, just as a totally random intellectual exercise as part of her budding theologian tendencies. It’s funny watching my D19 and S21 interact sometimes. She’s fascinated by theology, philosophy, and linguistics, reads St Augustine and essays on wisdom, etc. (and this is why she doesn’t love high school…literally no one shares these interests). Even my S21 looks at her and just kind of shakes his head. He’s much more of a mainstream little dude. I wish D19 would be spending a little more time prepping for her math final, but she’s having such fun. I gently suggested that she could maybe take some of those deep thoughts about the beginning of the world and her philosophy of life and work those into her Common App essay…she assured me that she is.
D19 asked her first letter writer this week too, via email since this teacher has transferred to a different school. She was grinning and energized by this teacher’s sweet response so that was a cool moment. D is going to have one rock-solid letter and one more ordinary letter.
Does anyone plan to submit supplemental letters? Thoughts on those?
Our student newspaper published a list of where the seniors are going to college and I was studying that list so much yesterday my kids started to make fun of me. I had heard through the grapevine about a few selective admissions (CMU, JHU, USC) but seeing the list for the entire class was interesting. There were fewer kids going to selective schools than I would’ve guessed. All together, about 80% of kids on this list are going to schools that are not selective. A full quarter of the list was community colleges. Most of the kids heading to selective schools are going to UCs, San Diego State or BYU. If you take out our California publics in the selective category, the number of kids going to top selective private colleges or universities was tiny – I think it’s fewer than 10 kids. There are pros and cons to this reality for my D19.
Ah, Thanks for that info! I was wondering about when the Common App switches over, @InfiniteWaves .
As planned for the first week of summer vaca, D & I opened her account & started filling out the info. Scary that it’s the real deal now. D has asked 3 teachers for recommendations but they all want her brag sheet emailed to them- so D will get on that asap. Also, she’s taking 3 summer classes that will count toward GPA and class rank, so now we won’t be able to get that part done until late August when the summer grades are added and calculated. So much for getting everything done early. Looking over the app. I am little confused about some portions… do we fill in all her classes & grades ourselves but still send the transcript anyway?
Best wishes to all the kids finishing up. I do have to say it’s a huge relief for Junior year to be over, but even more daunting to now have a rising Senior on my hands 
You don’t have to wait 2 months to set up a Common App and pre-populate some of the data. I am fairly certain it carries over from year to year, especially the generic stuff, like name, address, parents info, contact info etc. We’ve already filled that all out and then son sat down and started a word doc for the activities section and we’ll cut and paste it into the common app when ready.
A piece of advice is to use word docs for longer entries, because sometimes the common app crashes, and if you’ve been typing in a bunch of words and lose it all because of a crash it is frustrating and annoying.
My son met with his guidance counselor yesterday and she freaked out about his sports recruiting process and said he must get the best LORs, and she told him to not to use one of the teachers he was thinking of ( I guess this person stinks at writing LOR,s,ha). and recommended he use his science teacher. My son has a very good grade in this particular class but he thinks the guy is a weirdo. But maybe weirdos are good writers, lol? My son said he doesn’t have a good nor bad relationship with this teacher, but I’m not so sure he is the best person suited for the task. But it is a strong area for son19 and schools would like to see a LOR from this teacher stating that son can handle the difficult class.
Anyways, the GC is now going into overdrive and trying to help son19 so I am happy about that. He’s lined everything up now and it’s just a matter of figuring it all out during the summer and early Fall.
We have 2 weeks of school left and Fnals, so I am telling him to just hang on and make it thru junior year in one piece. It’s been a busy pressure filled crazy year, and I hope next year can be a little more relaxing for him.
So, in the car this morning, we saw some seniors headed to graduation ceremonies. S19 bursts out with, “There is so much that I have to do for senior year!”. I nodded, expecting to hear about essays or applications, or something scholastic. “I mean, there’s senior skip day, the senior play…”
Honey, I think we need to have a chat about priorities…
@ninakatarina LOL. S19 also freaking out a little. I’m hearing a lot of things like “I’m too young to be a senior. How did this happen so fast? I can’t believe my friends and I will be the oldest at the school next year. I can’t believe my senior friends are all done and going away!” I reminded him that it’s still a while before college and he doesn’t seem worried about that…more just stunned that he’ll be a senior when it seems like he was just a freshman.
I’m just astonished at how adult some of his classmates look. My memories of them as puffy cheeked gangly freshmen are too clear. Blink and it’s done and they’re shaving and interviewing for jobs.
I read once that the unfairness of parenthood is that just as you get your brain around how to parent a kid at one stage of development they’ve moved on to the next. I’ve only very occasionally felt mastery in being a parent. I’m always fuddled and frantically studying to catch up to the current phase. I suppose that’s why I’m obsessing on colleges. I’ve got to catch up quickly, or he’ll leapfrog past me again.
I can’t stuff him back into the box of childhood, he’s grown out of it and the corners will cut. But that doesn’t stop me wanting to face childish problems again. I understood those, I tell myself in retrospect. Never mind that I was just as befuddled then as I am now.
But I can still do a couple of things. Nag about deadlines, be a listener, brainstorm, encourage. Feed, water, and push out into the sunlight. It’s up to him to do the growing.
To me, S19 still looks like he does in his kindergarten school picture. All cuteness and adorability. H agrees with me. Everyone else however keeps saying that S19 looks like a 6’1" man with a beard, but I just don’t see it.
I just read the Student Questionnaire that has to be turned into the GC on the first day of senior year. S19 greeted each question with a smart-ass answer, an eye-roll, a blank stare, or a look of dread. Oh, and he asked me what a “transcript” is and I’m not sure he was kidding. Please send help! (The parent questionnaire is a little easier but I will still have to be a little creative).
My son suddenly seems a lot older now that he has his driver’s license and is asking to take the car somewhere every 15 minutes. I haven’t quite adjusted to that idea yet, much less senior year!
OK, my college sophomore is officially an adult. She was home talking about her job for the summer, and how she had talked her bosses into instituting certain changes and how she planed to apply her skills to various issues and suddenly I realized that she is a full adult. I would hire her. I would trust her to do a job. A moment ago, she was still a kid. I’m a little in shock.
Does anyone at a large public school have a helpful hands-on GC in this process? I’m curious. Those of you who are talking about meetings with GCs and other involvement, what kinds of schools are you at? We just don’t have that type of advocacy and assistance possible from our GC corps. They mean well, but with over 150 rising seniors on each of their advising lists, they’re just under-resourced.
I learned today that University of California schools do not allow “score select”, nor do they superscore. Just heads-up for anyone interested. The UCs do everything differently than everybody else…they have their own application, they’re only open for apps in the month of November, they calculate GPA in a super weird way, and now I guess they treat test scores differently too. D19 isn’t hoping for a UC but is applying to two to please DH so we have to know all this stuff. They also don’t have an essay (just several short-answer questions), and they don’t ask for a letter of rec. And yet they all want top-tier GPAs and the top 5% test scores. They are weird. When I think about it, it makes sense I suppose that our class of 500 is sending only about 30 kids to UCs, given their upper-echelon requirements…
Senior pictures appear to be a bigger pain than I’d hoped. I’m always comparing my high school experience to what we have to do for my kiddos. We got to choose our own photographer and poses could be fairly free-form. Apparently at D19’s school, there’s one and only one photographer, you have to scramble to get your session scheduled in the month of July, and of course nothing is cheap. D19 has been looking forward to her big fancy photography session for years, so I guess this means I have to take her for her yearbook photos in July and then take her separately to a high-end photography session whenever we want. Hmm.
@SDCounty3Mom our public HS school has about 1500 kids give or take. We have a decent amount of GC’s, maybe 6-10 of them?
They divide the kids up amongst them. The GCs usually reach out to the kids at a minimum of 1x per year to figure out schedule stuff. They also have group seasons a few times per year, and they do an OK job on getting the kids prepped for college admissions. They have sessions on using Naviance which have been helpful. The GC seems to like my kids for some reason and has gone out of her way to get to know them and help them, so I appreciate her help. I don’t always agree with her suggestions, but I’m not going to complain. She seems on the ball for the most part, so we are lucky,
Re CA : It sounds rather stressful living in CA and trying to get into one of the preferred state schools. It does seem confusing too.
@SDCounty3Mom there are approx 500 students in each class at our school. Our GCs change each year. Our senior GC is awesome . Our school provides several info sessions on financial aide and the application process.
S’s GC was the same for my D although she is moving to a new school in the fall (our school is very large). She’s very responsive and helpful when I need something or have a question, but doesn’t have the knowledge related to the colleges we are targeting other than the state flagships. Even within our state, she gave a college suggestion to S that just didn’t make sense to me. I thought her idea about keeping costs low or free and being the “big fish” made sense given that he is leaning a bit toward law school. However, I can’t see him being challenged there at all. I imagine his current curriculum is quite a bit more challenging that what he might have at that college, and S’s ACT score is 10 points higher than their average. I think he’d have great opportunities at some other state schools but that suggestion confirmed my opinion that I should stick with CC and other resources for college advice. Still, I’ll be sad to see our GC go, especially since she is on the ball with other things needed for college applications.
DD had one senior picture session Monday. The photographer is her cousin, so she’ll be taking advantage and doing several sessions. This one was soccer pics since she still has her uniform. Then we’ll wait till next week to see if the ortho says her braces can come off before scheduling more. She’ll probably do more summer, fall colors, and a few winter poses.
Right now she’s in NYC with the school band & choir!
My D19 attends a large high school where each GC has 500 students. Obviously, there are way too many kids to get any type of personal assistance. College info is disseminated via group sessions and online publications. I’m not completely freaked out since we’ve gone through this process for my S17. And, it looks like my daughter will only be applying to the UC schools. The real scary part is having such a short list of target schools with many offering low acceptances.
Only about 100 of the 400 kids in a graduating class go on to 4 year college from our school, and the majority of those go to the lower tier state schools. The GC is nice and well meaning but when I mention more selective schools her eyes get big and she says things like, “I’ve never had a kid from this school get in THERE! Good luck.”
She thoroughly approves of my safeties and matches, but she’s helpless talking about reach schools.