Our high school is phasing out APs, so S25 is just focusing on catching up after returning to school after surgery, and some SAT prep for a retake in June and/or October. Junior Prom is also on the horizon, not sure if he will go or not.
2 Likes
Yes, the paper/pencil thing is so hard! S25’s handwriting is really not all that great. His old English teacher made it a point to have them do most of their assignments with paper/pencil so that they got used to writing by hand specifically as a prep for the AP exam. The new one I think does a combination of both, but I still think his handwriting is terrible. I sound hypocritical though when I call him out for his messy handwriting because mine is nowhere near as neat as it should be anymore or close to what it was in high school or college.
SAT on May 4, AP Chem today, and AB Calc next Monday. It’s testing season. (Followed by 5-6 more weeks of school including another testing season for finals…)
2 Likes
Is the “UW” referred to here Wisconsin or Washington? I hope that is not too forward of a question; my daughter is actually considering applying to both UWisc and UWash and we will be OOS for both.
Good luck to your D25!
As to the system change, what could possibly go wrong?
1 Like
University of Washington or Washington University in St Louis? University of Washington is locally known as UDub and that can help differentiate it in discussions.
Agreed. It gets rather confusing.
For better or worse, she is considering UW (both Washington and Wisconsin) and WashU / WUSTL in St Louis. She is “gently” pushing back on WUSTL as it is too close (too close being ~7 hours drive).
1 Like
I live near the purple UW and my family lives near the red UW – so we clarify with the colors. 
WUSTL would be entirely different.
3 Likes
I am happy to see some summer tour dates opening up. Now to decide where to go.
- Maryville Uni MO
- Bellarmine
- U of Southern Mississippi
- Wayne State
- ULL
- Oklahoma City U
- Creighton
- Rider
- Stockton
- Lindenwood
- Shenandoah
- Le Moyne
- Western Carolina
- Jacksonville U
- SEMO
- U Missouri-Kansas City
eta forgotten school Creighton
2 Likes
Go to NJ and take a side trip to Ocean City boardwalk or Wildwood. Lots of fun rides and water parks. Visiting Stockton you should also see Atlantic City and there’s boardwalks and the casinos plus a new indoor water park. I’d go to OC or WW for the outdoor fun though
1 Like
Was thinking that. I am not going to the south in summer. But I do have a friend in MO that I may try to visit so we will see.
1 Like
S25 could have taken 5 AP exams this year, but we decided only to sign up for 3. He is taking Econ (Macro), Computer Science A, and English Lit, but isn’t taking the exam for Physics 1 or Geography. He has the exams for Com Sci and English on Wednesday, plus his DE Linear Algebra final in that evening. Then he takes the Econ exam late, because he misses the regular sitting of the exam due to traveling to ISEF in Los Angeles. I’m glad he’s only missing one exam though due to ISEF…it would have been a serious pain if somehow all of his exams fell during that week.
1 Like
AP Chem kicked my kid’s a$$ today! Oooof, need to move past and focus on the next exams!
7 Likes
Same here. She’s taking a nap now.
6 Likes
My kiddo only has one AP this year and one dual enrollment. But the AP Euro is sucking the life out of him. Quizzes on 20 pages front and back of packets every day for the next two weeks until the exam. And then they have finals. He used to like history, not so much after this class! He is more of a stem guy and not interested in putting that much time into this class.
NHS induction and the JROTC awards banquet were this weekend, nice to be recognized for hard work.
5 Likes
I’m the mean mom who sent their kid to the local college library to work because they focus so much better there than at home. 3 more AP’s to focus on plus all the work they missed today while taking the Chem test (classes carry on throughout AP testing season)
1 Like
No AP tests here, thank goodness. C25 just turned in the last final, so now it’s just waiting for grades.
Then the back half of May, the child and I are flying down to the lower 48, where we’ll do a set of NYC and NYC-ish tours: Hofstra, Fordham, and Stony Brook (the latter two as self-guided but official tours, because apparently they can’t be bothered to run guided tours during the month of May🤷). We’re then going to hit a couple colleges in Upstate New York, still trying to figure out whether we’re up for Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo on three consecutive days.
6 Likes
Still not much AP studying going on here. It was soccer senior night last night so she was at school til 8:30 then had to do some regular homework. Her AP Calc teacher is on his 3rd week of paternity leave so that’s a bit unfortunate for these kids. She’s just been going through her study book I got her during class time. She REALLY needs to get going on APUSH.
Her Bible teacher decided he needed to squeeze in one more paper AND a group presentation THIS week. It’s frustrating since the class is all juniors and senior so they all have AP tests. She will also be missing a Spanish test on Friday for her AP exam so she has to try to fit that in maybe Wednesday next week??
She is taking Lang and APUSH digitally but some of her classmates will be on a band trip on Friday so have to take a make-up day for it. They told them it may be on paper because of that. They were all worried about it!
3 Likes
At our HS you get a GPA bump (an extra .5) for an AP class. But you only get the bump if you take the exam and get a 3 or better. The school (or county? or state?) pays for the exam, so that’s not a problem, but it makes the exams more stressful than i think they need to be.
In other totally separate news, my guy had his Eagle Board of Review last night and is now officially an Eagle Scout! Woo Hoo! He had a lot of challenges getting his project going (he really wanted to do something on the grounds of his elementary school and ran into a lot of bureaucracy at the school and county level and ultimately had to shift his focus to get it approved) but he got it done and I’m so happy for him.
He’s getting a little lost this week and next as his big brother is home from college for only nine days, starting Wednesday night, so it was nice to have a night just for him. Fancy folks that we are (not) we went out for McDonald’s hot fudge sundaes and McFlurries after (I would’ve sprung for the funky independent ice cream shop, but by the time he was done, they were closed…)
18 Likes
interesting, so you can’t have a final 11th grade transcript until mid-summer, then?
It is nice they pay for the exams, though! My kid is required to take the AP exam if they take an AP class, but we do have to pay (and yes it is a public school, admittedly in upper-middle class area). And they DO work with kids who feel they can’t pay to get waiverst, etc.
Yep, no final transcript until mid-summer. But the catch is that they assume everyone gets a 3 or better at the end of the school year and give you the bump. So we’ll get a transcript at year end and if we need to get another later (which I really hope note) to correct for things, we will. My guy wants to apply to Clemson, whose application opens August 1, and the earlier you apply the earlier you can select your housing (I think, if what I read on threads here is accurate and i understood it correctly).
He likely won’t have his application ready on Aug 1, but will have it before school starts. And while the guidance team might be checking email over the summer and able to send a transcript, I don’t want to bank on it. So we’ll get the provisional one at year end, then we should know his scores before the August application timeframe. If he does 3 or better on the exams, we’ll use that and send it in. If he doesn’t, we’ll wait until we can get an adjusted transcript.
I think the point of this, from the school’s point of view, is to make sure the kids are treating the course and the test seriously. Plus they really encourage kids who wouldn’t do well in an AP to take the regular or honors equivalent class, on the theory of put you in the right class to challenge you where you can still excel. So they are thinking that the kids in AP classes SHOULD all get 3s or betters, because if they can’t perform at that level they should’ve been placed elsewhere (and we do have kids moving out of APs or down - like my kid dropped from BC calc to AB - all through the first semester). And this process basically making it count as part of their grade, sort of like a final exam. I get that. But it adds a fair amount of stress and all these kids already have enough of that.
3 Likes