Yes , extremely annoying! Why can’t adults, you know be adults?! Not a great way to start out a stressful test. It also didn’t go as planned as she “heard” (ie TikTok) it was going to be an easier sitting. When in fact it was even a harder sitting then the exams this fall. I did remind her she could go test optional. However one reach is requiring and the other reach is rumored to be preferred even though they are optional. We have the holidays to keep us occupied the next few weeks.
This has been a quiet thread! And I can’t believe we’re nearly at the half way mark for junior year. Yikes - where did the time go?
My 27 is also at an independent school with solid college counseling. They’ve been slowly increasing the amount of exposure the juniors have through monthly seminars, and they’ll start having one-on-one meetings in the next semester.
My 25, however, went to LPS and had little to no college counseling support. This was at a small school, too. They just didn’t really do anything until senior year and they assumed the kids who were planning on college would stay in-state. It was frustrating, and since I knew from other friends that we needed to get the ball rolling sooner, my 25 and I were more proactive than his college counseling office. I found that this site helped immensely during that time, and even though my family pushed for us to hire a private counselor, we did not and it worked out fine for my 25.
Update on the 27 is… mixed. It was a rough fall. He got a concussion early on, and even once he recovered from that, he did not get to really participate enough in the sport he loves. So that was a downer, but there were some good lessons that did come out of the experience. Academically, things are what I would describe as tense. He was doing OK with room for improvement during the first quarter, but now it looks like he’s pulling two Cs. We’re thinking of getting him some tutoring for the next quarter, if not the whole semester. Even though we’re primarily focused on fit, I don’t want his options to narrow so much because his grades aren’t cutting it.
We’ve also been talking a lot about a gap year, and I think it will almost be a given for him. My husband is even contemplating letting him take more than the year if he’s just not ready. I am so mixed about this, since he is going to have to go through this whole application process regardless, and few colleges would allow him to take more than one year before starting his degree. Of course, this is all hypothetical right now and so much can and will change between now and this time next year, if the experience we had with my 25 is any indication.
Hope the testing went great for those taking the SAT today!
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SAT went… fine?! I think? This is my reserved kid so she gives me very little, and was mostly just glad it was over.
She’s at a small-ish private with dedicated college counseling (2 counselors for ~140 kids). I’ve been lurking on these boards for two years and have gained so much knowledge, can’t even explain how grateful I am to all the parents who generously share their experiences. However, since her dad and I both defaulted to our local flagship for college, D27 thinks I’m fairly useless. But since I didn’t do this whole process 30 years ago, I know what I don’t know, and am nerding out hard on learning as much as I can. And we know parents who did the more involved version of this process in their time but the game has changed so much that the playbook is totally different for all of us. I’ve been gently trying to convince her of my utility but will be glad to loop in the college counselor in January when one-on-one meetings start.
But for now, we wait for scores…
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I think that is long and short of it - if a kid has parents who pay a lot of attention or the kid is very organized/activated on their own, it is likely all fine! I love my kid’s super active college counselors but really just very reassuring, nothing gets dropped, and that every little thing has been done well (even though little things matter a ton less than grades).
My kid took the SAT for the first time Saturday, which was definitely a transportation ordeal from our rural AK town. First, she had to go over the day before (since boats/planes that go to the community where they had the test won’t go before daylight). Then after the test the winds were so high that neither boats nor planes would travel at all until Sunday afternoon. 2 days gone for a 2 hour test. I hope for logistics sake she does well, but she does want the option of some reach schools that will want a high score, so will likely want to try again.
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And thank you for reminding us all of the ordeals our AK students have to go through! I have testing sites short drives away (3-4-6 miles), and (knock wood) available.
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Wow, that is amazing. No more complaining from our kids (or me for that matter) about drives to get to their commitments! I’ve got everything crossed as well that she is happy with her score!
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Wow, another point of how testing isn’t equitable. Finger crossed they are happy with their score.
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D27 received an email from the College Board today offering an additional SAT next weekend due to the issues which caused additional stress at the SAT sitting she attended (some students were delayed up to two hours due to staffing issues). She has to decide before the scores are released and call them with her decision whether she will retake them on the offered date. I told her to sleep on it and then make a decision as she was a hard no, not taking that again. Right after the SAT she thought she “was cooked” however now she thinks she did pretty well in Math and doesn’t want to retake the sitting now…maybe in March. We are both happy that College Board at least recognizes the issue and is offering the re-test.
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Very similar experience with my older kids to you as well. Both attended the same (very good) public school that sends kids to Ivy+ consistently (my oldest went to Dartmouth from there) and I made my kids make appointments with their counselors each year. Otherwise they wouldn’t have met with them except potentially once at some point about college stuff. The school is so big (over 2000 kids) that the counselors won’t write a letter of rec for a college unless it is required (and the student needs to show proof from the college website that it’s required (not recommended) and then, they ask kids to fill out a form about their activities inside and outside school, etc so they can write a fairly tailored recommendation. But if they didn’t have that form, most of them wouldn’t be able to write anything specific about the students because they just don’t know them as there are too many kids and not enough counselors.
My youngest (the 27) attends an independent school, as mentioned and the school has three full-time college counselors. Like yours, it’s their only job on campus, and there are about 100 kids per grade. The counselors meet with the juniors once a week starting this week to help them through list making, applications, essays, etc. My student’s school differs from yours in that not as many students are applying to the highly selective schools. But they do also have an academic advisor they meet with weekly to talk about life, school, set a four-year plan, discuss extracurricular opportunities, etc.
And students for sure can (and do) get Cs at this independent school as well! My student had a teacher in 9th grade who flat out said that they didn’t give a grade higher than an 89 unless the student was doing high-level, college work. In 9th grade, that wasn’t happening, so my student got an 89 on just about everything as that was the highest grade you could get if you were doing excellent high school work.
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S27 took the ACT this morning (40 min from home) and had to drive home in a Winter Storm! I was really paranoid about letting him go, but he still wanted to do it despite the weather. Luckily the test seemed to go well, and he took it slow and got home safely! He never really did much practice for it, so we’ll see. SAT is probably fine for most of the schools, but he wanted to try the ACT in case it was better.
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Yes, there is time. We contemplated a gap year for our S25, for athletic and academic reasons. We ended up not doing it and every day I am glad we all decided to move forward without a gap. I think some kids are never truly “ready” in certain aspects, but some just need to be out of the house and on their own to start blossoming, which was the case for S25. Never in a million years we thought he was going to thrive socially as he is as a Freshman in college. From an emotional standpoint, by December of his high school senior year, he had outgrown the family life - he was clearly ready to start his own life away. Also, there is something to be said about going through the application process with peers/friends.
I know everyone is different and only you know your child. Just thought I’d share our experience.
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A kid with some Cs on their transcript will have a number of college options available to find the right fit. The majority of colleges in the U.S. accept the majority of their applicants. So although a lot of chatter on CC focuses on the small minority of schools that reject more than they accept, that is not the entirety of the college landscape.
Good luck to your family.
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My D27 is nervous about the grade for her final project in her first-ever college class, which she’ll know in a couple days. It was a genetics class, and the prof heavily suggested the students do something different/more interesting than a paper or slide deck, so she programmed a hybrid-zone model in Python. But she was supposed to use references, and couldn’t find any outside sources for models that she could reasonably implement in the time frame for the class and just went ahead and built her own based on the standard population equations and info from the class. Hopefully it works out for her. I was out of town all week, and she couldn’t bounce thoughts off me. Good experience for her to navigate that, I guess, but it’ll be a bummer if she gets a bad grade, especially since she loved the class and would like to ask the prof for a recommendation next year.
Even if the professor does ding her for not having references, I don’t think that would necessarily impact the likelihood of getting a good recommendation from the professor. He wanted something different and she thought outside of the box and came up with something different.
I recall a class I took in college, and we had to do a presentation to the class to teach them something, and I had simplified some of the concepts for the students and made a game out of it and probably had one of the most engaging of the class presentations. In the comments on the assignment the professor indicated that I had probably simplified it a bit too much, but I don’t think it ended up harming me in the long run as the professor asked me to serve as his assistant in that class the next two times it was offered. (I also earned an A- in the class, as only one person received a straight A, thereby ruining my chance for a 4.0 in college…but it was also a load off my shoulders, because I didn’t have to strive for perfection either…and I still graduated with honors/distinction, so I didn’t totally blow off academics.)
All that to say, I think things are going to work out for your D and the class.
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Too true! And thank you for that reminder. I think I was mostly worried that he could not seem to address what the issues in the class were. Since my post, he discovered on his own that he needed to go about studying differently than he had been, which is super, and he has met with a tutor. That really helped him with some of the concepts that just weren’t clicking despite repeatedly going for extra help from the teacher and getting frustrated because the extra help wasn’t actually helping.
The journey with my 27 has been different than it was for his older brother, mainly because my 25 was a solid 4.0 student and is one of those kids who works hard to get the grades, but never really hit any big academic challenges or bumps. My 27 was always the kid who didn’t work super hard because for a time he was at a school where there was no social value placed on doing well in school. No one cared, and when your kid’s peers don’t care, it becomes an uphill battle to get your kid to care. So we’ve always been on high alert for any sign that things were dropping off, sometimes at the expense of paying attention to why that might be happening. He’s in a very different kind of school now and he’s taking joy and pride in his work again - half the battle to be sure!
All that being said, I’m super proud of how he handled the situation and the end of the term when I think he felt like things were spiraling a little. He’s put himself in a good position to start the second semester and I think he’s definitely heading in the right direction again. If he still comes through with a C or two at the end of the year, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. We know he’s putting in the effort and the work, and that he’s learning more about himself in the process.
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D27 ended up getting a B in the genetics class (no + and - at these schools), and emailed the prof this morning to ask if they’d be willing to write a recommendation. It ended up being the “reading scientific papers” assignments that brought her down more than not having references on the final project. Which, probably she should have gone to office hours about that, but knowing it’s a weakness gives this science-focused kid time to work on the skill – perhaps I’ll have her do some kind of analyzing scientific literature elective next year. She never got diagnosed dyslexic (late slow reader with many dyslexics in family who wasn’t behind enough when tested in high school – though did get accommodations for writing at that point).
On the other hand, she just got back her SAT of 1540 (790 Math, 750 English), and is happy with that. It’s at least near the middle for all the schools she’s looked at, and she probably won’t take it again, because I can’t imagine the small improvement she might make in English would matter (and at that point math is a crapshoot where reading a question wrong could make it go down as easily as up).
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I hope everyone’s doing well as we turn the corner into 2026! I haven’t posted in a while, but my S27 is looking at several LACs, and if you follow the RIP (formerly, they just changed the name) thread on closures it does give me some trepidation. What I have found to help, and thought I would share as I haven’t seen it discussed is ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. You can look up any private, non-profit university and see the schools revenue, expenses, and net income. These yearly breakdowns also allow you to access the schools yearly federal 990 form and audit forms.
Here is an example: Macalester College
I just wanted to share, as I have found this to be helpful when comparing schools. Plus, I don’t want my son attending a school that won’t exist 5, 10, 15, or 20+ years from now.
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Thanks for sharing. I’m sure about to go down a rabbit hole now.
We started discussing our college plan tonight and things went a little south. We’ve talked about doing college tours during winter break but now that planning must get started and the college thing is real, someone is starting to freak out. Planning for their older sibling was a lot easier in a way since they were a recruited athlete, it just narrows things way down. For D27 they can apply anywhere and will need to apply to a lot of schools for their competitive major. It’s just overwhelming. Maybe DH and I wiil need to revisit the ED option. I’m just not into that game.
We’ve made some progress and booked some tours for winter break. I think things will be easier after seeing some additional schools.
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