I really think percentage grades are the way to go. Let the colleges figure out their own GPA scales.
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S25s school does NGA…numerical grades on a 100 point scale… It just shows where your kid is on a 100 point scale. It’s up to the college to translate that to whatever they want…
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Ditto
Mine is probably going to skip on the Regular, but will see if just forgets about UNC all together.
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Kiddo has had his applications in since mid-September, but I am getting my obsessive college application fix with his best friend today. He has been really stressed about getting everything in, but he won’t talk with his mom about it. She asked if I would step in as a sounding board and essay reviewer, since I’ve known him forever. So that’s what I’m doing today, and it’s great fun getting my fix without the stress of it being my own kid. (And I owe my friend for the 10 years of free veterinarian advice she’s given me!)
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S25 is done with applications, and has been for a while. I had grand plans for this weekend, thinking he’d be really reveling in having breathing room today and a free weekend since the quarter ended yesterday. But NOOOOO. He didn’t get all his English assignments and chem labs turned in. He got one set of English questions done yesterday, the other is due today NLT 3:15 (the time the school day typically ends, although they have no school today). He “doesn’t know” if he can still turn in the chem labs, but he’s going “to try”. So on his last Halloween at home, he didn’t get to go be with his friends, or help hand out candy, or do anything fun, he was busting his butt on English (he thought it was all due at midnight, didn’t find out until this morning that he had a little extra time). Sigh. I’d like this to be a lesson to him - the problem started because he was confident that he really had until Monday COB (Monday is a teacher training day, Tuesday is grade prep day). But he had no reason to believe that, he was just guessing. And he guessed wrong. But thinking that he’d have basically four days of his five day weekend to catch up, he didn’t push as hard as he could have last weekend or during the week.
If chemistry is due tonight, he may be missing the last home football game to get it done. He’s giving himself these consequences, not me, so at least that’s good. But it just makes me sad that his failure to plan earlier is causing him to miss stuff that he really wants to do. I’m hopeful that, if nothing else, this is a learning moment and helps him remember to work earlier next time.
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Well, now the truth comes out… and S25 confessed that he hasn’t even filled out the self-assessment form to give to the teacher who will write him a LOR. Who knows when he will be in a position to apply. Hard to understand why… fear? insecurity?
The schools he is applying to are rolling admissions but still. It’s not like he has a stellar GPA.
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Those forms can be hard for some kids. I think some kids just aren’t used to talking about themselves or are uncomfortable and don’t want to sound like they are bragging. Also, it may be hard for them to recognize their accomplishments. I had to help my son fill his out, showing him where some of his more unusual activities counted as quality time spent outside (or inside) of school.
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Thank you, that’s a helpful perspective. I can see how my son would be feeling intimidated by the form- it’s 2 pages long, and he has had many struggles in school. This particular teacher saw him reach bottom and turn it around. He became an active participant in her class and finished the year with a strong grade. I hope my son will see that as a positive.
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Fascinating email to the kid from Rochester today.
For context, they’ve been sending gobs and tons of emails the past few weeks reminding that today is their ED deadline (they don’t have EA). C25 has been (and is still) planning to apply RD by 1 December, because that’s the deadline for consideration for their good scholarships.
So having not received an application from C25 yet, they’ve presumably decided to assume that there’s probably no ED application coming—and so the email has a subject line saying “It’s not too late to apply!”, and it then goes on to say that their ED2 deadline is 5 January.
There is also a mention that their RD deadline is (also) 5 January, but not until the very last line of the email.
Like, the insistence of selective colleges on pushing ED just gets weird sometimes. I understand it at a planning level for them, but c’mon, really?
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My kid really struggled with those forms. We ended up basically talking about the questions at dinner and I took notes. Then I drafted responses for him based on what he’d talked about and he took those drafts and edited or changed them to be more on point. What I wrote on paper was nearly verbatim what he’d said, and when he saw it on paper he was happy. But somehow the getting started with writing it on his own was really hard for him. Starting our conversation by talking about the question and why they were asking it and what the point was and what he wanted to try to get across made it a lot easier for him the conceptualize what an answer might be.
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Success! S25 actually completed that SRAR on time! It’s a Halloween miracle. Submitted his ED app last night as well. And now let the waiting commence… he’s taking a breather for a short bit before we ask him to work on a few RD apps. I was still skeptical of his decision to ED yesterday (didn’t tell him that of course), but this morning he said he was actually feeling nervous about the wait and what news he’ll get sometime in December. I take that as a good sign - it means he’s more excited about it than he let on and that tells me he really made the right call. It’s been a roller coaster few weeks with the shuffling of schools around on his list and that made me pause every time he made a change.
So here’s where things stand now.
EA: UNH, Clemson
ED: St. Olaf
In the RD pile and TBD what happens next: W&M, Yale, GWU, UVM, Colgate, Fordham, Colby, and Midd (these last two were in contention for an ED shot until late last week). If things do not go as hoped in December, we’ll revisit and possibly add another safety or target to the list (thinking Siena or SUNY Geneseo).
And now I get to enjoy having 5 13-year old boys in my house for a scary movie sleepover. Yay weekend!!
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OMG can I be real with you guys?
Essays are apparently this kid’s cryptonite. He can’t seem to do anything else when his essays aren’t done (homework, fun, sleep, etc) and he can’t really grok how to write the essays. Last night I sat with him and coaxed him for an hour and he managed to get a decent start to his WPI essay. He assured me that he was on a roll so I left the room to have dinner. An hour later? nothing changed. He confessed, after a stormy encounter, that he’d been wondering about a calc question that he missed and went down the rabbit hole of watching calc videos on Youtube.
This is a kid who somehow managed to get 5s on his AP World/US/Lang exams. The grades are slipping. His sanity is slipping. I am frantically trying to convince him to jettison schools because he seems to have a massive mental block against developing real content for them and once again, we’re in some kind of O. Henry scenario wherein the application for academic advancement harms his ability to maintain his academic fitness for academic advancement. WOE.
(Case isn’t going to happen. Mines could happen but really shouldn’t because I don’t think he’d survive it. Purdue? we got nothing. But he badly wants to apply there because one of his best friends is using it as a fallback to Stanford/Cal/MIT and maybe they could go there together. I’m just trying to salvage WPI, St. Olaf, and Union, which blessedly requires only the common app essay. And then he needs to get his act together, quickly, before those A- grades turn into Bs and our whole strategy needs to change.)
This is the bad place.
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I don’t think Case has a supplemental?
It’s going to be OK, hang in there. Some kids just need someone to sit and talk it through with them from start to finish. My son was like that, not the greatest writer and a lot of anxiety about the next step. He is currently a senior at college, head of his research lab and can write exceptionally well. He will make it through and it will all work out!!
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No, they don’t. But I’m feeling at this point as though it’s a waste of an application slot (the common app essay is still really weak because he’s backed away from it in the effort to do the supplementals. And in the meantime his grades are worse than I’d like. I think I’d rather have him punt on that one until he can at least right the ship.)
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This is where I wish I had access to the head-banging-into-a-brick-wall emoji I used all the time at my last workplace. Ugh. It has got to be supremely frustrating to have him so clearly on task while you are coaxing him and then going off the rails when you leave his side for just a moment.
All that to say, I’m sorry. Yes, the ship will get righted, and the essays will get writed (haha, you know what I mean), but dang…what a bumpy ride.
Lots of virtual hugs, and hang in there.
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Some kids need to compartmentalize. We helped S25 manage this by having him write down his entire high school schedule day by day, one week at a time. Then we scheduled out which days he’s working on what essays depending on what he had going on any particular day - 2 hours for X school on Monday, 1 hour to finish X school on Tuesday, 2 hours on Y school on Wednesday, etc. Yes, it was a lot of administrative work scheduling week by week, but this seemed to work better than telling him to work on all the school apps at the same time because that literally got nowhere and all the pre-back-to-school time was squandered away.
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One of the colleges we visited with D19 - I am not sure I remember exactly which but think it may have been Georgetown - said that this type of LOR can be among the strongest they get.
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Also worth remembering (from the point of view of someone currently revising a scholarly paper for publication, and part of the revision involves expanding the section on emerging adulthood—that’s the technical term): There is this ethic here on CC that the college application process has to be driven entirely by the student, and that parental assistance is helicoptering at best, stunting the child’s development at worst.
This is bollocks.
During emerging adulthood, which our kids are all on the cusp of entering—they’re not even all the way to that stage yet!!—guidance on the part of parents and other mentors is vital to development. Yeah, don’t do everything for them, but if they need direction, they need direction. That’s what you’re there for!
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