I wouldn’t consider this a setback or failure at all. Your kid is still a really good student. And there’s hundreds of colleges out there for students like yours. Heck, my college freshman got some C’s on her HS transcript and she got accepted to every school she applied to. So don’t lose hope.
Not everybody’s kid on CC or elsewhere are all straight A students. Parents on CC whose kids have a 3.5 or lower tend to be pretty quiet about their kids’ GPAs because, in my opinion, of all of the parents and students posting on other parts of the boards about they fear they are ‘doomed’ because they got one A- or one B.
There’s a lot of maturing that happens between now and the start of college. At this time a year from now, your kid will be a different person than they are now.
Finals are next week for us. He is doing pretty well and will study for a couple of them, I hope. I don’t think they do course selections until March or so. He has 2 elective spots that he doesn’t have any great idea of what to take. We’ll figure out something.
Only my view, but 5 A’s and 2 B’s - she’s obviously doing something right. I’m sure it’s frustrating to experience the effort but with that type of capabilities (she nailed / maintained 5 of the 7), she is obviously very bright.
Coming from someone who is only considering our in-state SUNY schools, I’ve almost sworn off CC as the population seems to favor more private type schools that are more “ivy type”. I’d suggest hanging in there even if it’s just for this one thread.
By the way… my D26 is dedicated but has certainly gone through and still experiences ‘lapses’ in motivation at times and then eventually catches up.
4500 kids is an amazing number for me to read. Our D26’s school tops around 1380 students in all.
Love all the updates and once again it is a reminder of how different all our kids HS experiences are!! My D26 had all her first semester grades in before Christmas During the holidays we once again looked at our schedules to try to find the time to visit her current # 1 school choice and that was a nightmare!! But fingers crossed we found a date in March. My D26 is at a large public almost 1000 in her graduating class with zero adequate counselors luckily of my two kiddos she is doing a great job staying on top of what she needs to do to graduate. Our S28 is at a smaller private with a huge counseling department he has already spent more time with his counselor then my daughter!! The lack of counseling at my D26’s school is why I joined CC we are not focusing on any of the T50 schools while there is certainly a lot of focus on that in CC there is so many other resources, which I have found helpful. I hope everyone enjoys the long weekend
Our finals are worth 10% of the grade, which means it’s difficult to change much, which also means many don’t study. If you go in with a 91% (A-) and ace the final you still have an A-, but 91.9%. Lol. How about your schools? Is it more like trying to prep for college where they are 25% and more?
S26 is on his 4th counselor, so not much help for college, even if that was a thing at our school. He’s also on his 3rd principal. So many changes in the past 3 years. Huge teacher turnover as well, so not much consistency. It makes things difficult.
Ours differ by subject but I think it’s mostly 10-15% of final. (The school system we came from - we are immigrants- had finals as 70% of the grade so it’s vastly different.). But the subjects also differ in what % of final grade is formative/homework and class work vs summative/tests and quizzes. For example this year for C26 math is 95% summative and history 75%. My adhd kid benefits the higher the summative % is.
For D26, about 25-40% of the final grade in a class is based on the final exam. D26’s entire grade has ~40 students. And I think grades 9-12 is about 200-250 in total (charter school, not private). Way different than the 500+ students in my high school graduating class! My high school counselor basically only talked to me for 15 min once a year in the spring to look over my requested classes for the next school year.
Another practice AP exam is done. D26 had the Spanish practice test today. Don’t think she did very well on it, but this year’s spanish teacher is brand new and learning how to teach as he goes. Oh boy.
D26 said she’s now very interested in the minor in Diplomatic & US Military History minor at Embry Riddle-Prescott. AND likes how for 1 of your humanities general ed classes there, you can take a class called “Myth & Marvel in the Cinematic Universe,” which is all about Marvel movies…that’s totally up my kid’s alley.
Kid has work tomorrow + a school project to work on. So we’re chillin’ at home this weekend.
I can relate!! D26 has two brand new AP teachers… for AP Bio and AP Lang. They don’t seem to be getting much mentoring from the senior teachers who usually teach these subjects. In addition to not being familiar with all the material, D says the teachers also haven’t figured out how to manage their classrooms, so a lot of students aren’t paying attention, and there’s a lot of blatant cheating going on as well.
In our district, they don’t give AP practice tests, but the whole year of tests is structured like the AP exams (just in small chunks). Like AP history classes have DBQs, LEQs, multiple choice quizzes, etc. They are given the rubric for each of these kinds of tests based on how the College Board scores them and are judged against it all year. It’s nice that they walk into the AP Exam with so much familiarity with what they are going to do.
Our school does midterms. Classes are generally the full year long. And midterms are 20% of the semester grade. Grades just posted. D26 studied her tail off. Managed good grades but was not happy with precalc. Apparently no one got an A in either honors section.
We had our “Junior Class Parent Night” last week and it is crazy that we are already right back in this place. I feel like we just did this for S24. D26 is definitely in a good place in terms of organization. She has a long list of about 15 schools. Ideally she will shorten it to 10-12 but as she wants nursing, she may need to keep it longer. I would love for her to knock off her two major reaches since admission is so unlikely (UT Austin and UVA). She is visiting both in April and hoping she is only lukewarm about them, but from everything I have heard about UT, she will love it and I already know she will love Charlottesville and UVA. She will also visit JMU and TCU that same week. Hoping she loves both of those as they are realistic for her and great nursing programs. She is also excited about visiting her brother at his school for a weekend to see what “real” college life is like
She is working on finding some hours in a medical facility this summer and has started reaching out to places. She had planned on doing a nursing camp at a college this summer but is not 100% sure yet. Course selection for next year is not for a few more weeks but she is pretty sure she knows what she wants to take: Spanish 4, Pre-Calc, Stats, Honors Civics (may do AP Gov instead), AP Lit, Honors Anatomy and Physiology. She will also do a Senior Project in April and May most likely in a medical setting. Once that begins, she only attends school for her AP classes. It is all coming so quickly and I am finding myself in disbelief that we will be empty nesters in 18 months. Crazy.
My D26 has a list of about 15 schools at this point. We were really not judicious about visits, didn’t really look as closely as we should have at admissions requirements and now she’s killing herself trying to get her test scores in the range of consideration of a couple of schools she fell in love with. If she doesn’t score in the ballpark, she may need to pare down her list of selective schools, cast a wider net of other schools.
One of them is very selective and though her grades and EC’s are super strong, her SAT score isn’t strong enough for that one (according to the CDS that’s currently there).
She is going to take one more run at the SAT in early June. When the new CDS gets posted we will take another look at it to see after her second test, if it makes sense to submit the score.
We aren’t putting pressure on her and she’s very much keeping it real for herself. Main goal and focus is on actual course load taking place, not the SAT. The other two, based on last year’s CDS, she’s ‘good to go’ for submitting with her first test.
We’ve been to all three school, two different times last year. We will probably take another visit to each starting in a few months.
We’ve also visited a 4th school a couple different times. At the moment she has stated she’s not interested in it. We’ll see…
It’s an interesting dynamic that’s taking place as the process is underway.
Looks like our plans to visit Univ of Tulsa at their preview day event on 4/4 have to be cancelled. D26’s request for that weekend off from work got rejected. I sort of expected that. It’s ok. We’ll go some time on a week day during fall break this October instead. Good thing I hadn’t bought plane tickets yet.
Hi y’all. I am new to this thread and I’ve been following along for a while but I’d like to jump in.
D26 appears to be running out of gas, I don’t want her to get too comfortable. She has her sights set on UT and is an autoadmit. I’m (gently) staying after her about internships and summer programs though, we’re in the home stretch. I took her to visit 3 colleges last summer. We will visit a laundry list this summer as well just for fun, we had a blast last summer. I’m going to miss her nagging me around the house. She has a solid list of 6 colleges to apply to.
I am assuming top 6% of her class? I just saw their crazy admission stats from this year’s early admission cycle- unreal they got 90K applications alone just for EA round, and their entire application pool last year was 70K. They announced they are dropping from top 6% to top 5% for next year due to the high numbers of TX kids applying now. My D26 is visiting in April and likely will end up not even applying b/c it is impossible, especially for us being OOS. But we will be out in TX anyway visiting and really want her to see Austin and the UT campus.
So we gave D26 the choice of either doing a 90 minute per week ACT/SAT prep class (which would end up being more like 3 hours with transportation there and back) OR doing a 3 hour live webinar for ACT prep through the tutoring company my S24 uses AND doing weekly practice tests until her Feb 8th ACT. She chose the latter. She has NOT done weekly practice tests. She had a three day weekend and did nothing until late afternoon yesterday when she finally sat down and did a timed math section. She was not able to finish. Panic ensued. Then tears. Then “why are you putting so much pressure on me”? The fact that she says we are putting pressure on her is honestly laughable. We have not said a single word about it until last night when I responded to her panic “well now you know you have to do lots of practice tests before the February 8th test so you can get faster and be more prepared”. I am honestly annoyed and frustrated she thinks we are pressuring her. We truly do not care other than the fact that she wants nursing school and most of the schools she is looking at require test scores for admission and/or merit. I asked her just now if she has come up with a plan and she said she will do one section per night (that would be a miracle). But I just said “sounds like a good plan” and that was that. I am hoping she sticks to it.
I had the same problem. I signed her up for a virtual SAT prep class I found from facebook and she complained about it every chance she got. It did help! She made a comment to me about pressure and I was baffled. She made these goals for herself and I’m just trying to make sure she doesn’t drop any balls on the way there. She could drive Lyft for the rest of her life and I wouldn’t care as long as she was happy.
During the holidays we once again looked at our schedules to try to find the time to visit her current # 1 school choice and that was a nightmare!! But fingers crossed we found a date in March. My D26 is at a large public almost 1000 in her graduating class with zero adequate counselors luckily of my two kiddos she is doing a great job staying on top of what she needs to do to graduate. Our S28 is at a smaller private with a huge counseling department he has already spent more time with his counselor then my daughter!! The lack of counseling at my D26’s school is why I joined CC we are not focusing on any of the T50 schools while there is certainly a lot of focus on that in CC there is so many other resources, which I have found helpful. I hope everyone enjoys the long weekend 
Oh boy.
