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<p>Agreed. Many people are such blabbermouths who have no sense of what information is common knowledge/innocuous and what’s not…or they could care less which sends shivers down my spine. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, this could have professional ramifications as I’ve seen colleagues and friends in financial and law firms…including attorneys getting fired and professionally reprimanded because they didn’t have enough discretion about keeping confidential information CONFIDENTIAL.</p>
<p>“If someone wants to know how much of a raise I got or whether or not I got a bonus last year, what’s the point of keeping it secret”.</p>
<p>I learned the answer at age 17, working in a shoe store. You can inadvertently cause hard feelings. My manager challenged me to sell a certain number of purses (high profit extra) in order to get a 5cent/per hour raise. We worked a little under minimmum wage + commission (+ extra if need that week to get to minimum wage). I asked another high school worker for favor, to send the purse customers my way. I told her the reason, and she threw an incredibly hissy fit. </p>
<p>Our wages had been same, but she was doing more than me - she did bookwork entries and such. She was terribly hurt by it. I started to understand what I thought was weird behavior of my dad keeping financial info private.</p>
<p>When I was in my twenties, I (and many other employees) were getting our MBA’s in evening programs, courtesy of our employer. The two major MBA programs in our city were both top-notch and rivals of one another, with a lot of friendly back-and-forth between one another. The one that I was going to was, at the time, ranked #1 in the country. </p>
<p>I had one manager (an alum of the other b-school) who would ask me and others, point-blank, in meetings with other people present, “So, what did you get on your GMAT?” We all refused to answer him, because we all thought it was boorish behavior. People were embarrassed for him, because he obviously had no clue that it just wasn’t a question that you asked someone. Finally, at one point, he pressed me one too many times, and I’d had enough and said, “Well enough to get into the #1 b-school in the country.” It shut him up enough that he stopped asking the rest of us. Maybe he got the clue that it was an inappropriate question to ask.</p>
<p>Household income around $180-190k/year (darn profit sharing formula keeps changing) weight around 200 lb (more during crunch times at work when food flows freely :-)) and Benazapril 20mg for blood pressure… I also walk 5 miles a day several days a week, sleep 5 hours a day, maybe 6, and drive a pair of Saabs. </p>
<p>I did a lot of college part time as well and believe it or not as long as I got a B nobody cared (so they would pay the tuition :-)).</p>
<p>My GRE scores were not the greatest (never had to take it really, Cajun State asked me to take it just for my file and for some strange reason Purdue never asked for a GRE… I remember (vaguely) I did well on the verbal part and sucked wind on the math part (what’s new) and somehow around 1200 (old style scores), maybe 700 or so verbal (gotta love computational linguistics) and 500 math, (atrocious after 2 engineering degrees). Also showed up for TOEFL and got a 610 without prep and that was back in my home country…</p>
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<p>Ha! Your former manager could have easily been one of dozens of high school classmates and their parents who were just as persistent and possibly more ornery about it.* </p>
<p>Being a young adolescent…I decided to toy with them by telling them nonsensical figures like “Oh, I got a zero.” or “-156”. Was priceless to see their faces when they found out about my admission to a top 25 LAC around graduation when I said, “Not every school wants a student who scored in the positive range.” Sometimes, being smart alecky to rude people can be loads of fun! :D</p>
<ul>
<li>Not all of them were first-generation immigrant parents contrary to some commonly held stereotypes…</li>
</ul>
<p>Ok…well my son, who honestly answered in what he thought was an appropriate way, not sarcastic or smart alecky, responded to the how did you do on the SAT question with “I don’t remember, but I think it was like a B or B-”. He told me he was thinking about where his scores fell percentile wise…lol</p>
<p>Sometimes parents need to ask :-). When we were preparing to come to the US for school 30 years ago we had to take the dreaded TOEFL and most schools back then wanted 550. This very good friend of mine (college classmate) took it 3 times scoring a 545 all three times despite ‘intensive’ tutoring by a mid-40’s very, ehem, bilingual divorcee. Let’s just say it was Dustin Hoffman and ‘The Graduate’ all over again. His father finally figured it out after asking the rest of his friends how they did… </p>
<p>Likewise, I’ve seen people that scored 600+ on the TOEFL and could not order a burger at Wendy’s… Had a few as TA’s in fact. So, this really begged the question (“how much did you pay to get that 600 in TOEFL and where did you pay it”…)</p>
<p>So, there, a good reason or two to ask your friends what they got on the standardized tests :-)</p>
<p>Reenaz- love your son’s response and that it was totally honest. ;-)</p>
<p>Pizzagirl:</p>
<p>"So how much do you weigh, what is your household’s income, and what medications do you take? "</p>
<p>About 265, which as a 5’8" female classifies me as obese, but since I suffered from anorexia in my late high school/early college years, I’ve since been paranoid about dieting.</p>
<p>As a single mom, I make roughly $65K per year + I get child support. It’s enough for a comfortable life, but I and other single female friends, definitely envy dual income households.</p>
<p>I don’t take any medications regularly and think society is pretty overmedicated in general. I occasionally take cold medicine and very rarely ibuprofin, but that’s about it.</p>
<p>Now does it really matter, in the slightest, that I just typed any of that?</p>
<p>I think that it is often not the question that is asked, but the way in which it is asked. My oldest son is a quiet boy who was always a very strong student…very bright, and also a hard worker. He is one of those kids who is strong across the board but not the superstar…not the math genius but did very well in the top math class offered at the high school, not the kid whose creative writing was published, but ended up co-EIC of a nationally ranked school paper. Not NMF, but commended. Played soccer both for the school varsity team and with a club, and was very involved in a youth group where he ended up on the national board…both his soccer club and youth group were “off the radar” with some of the ulta-competitive ones at school. He never really bragged about what he was accomplishing…we sometimes felt he was almost invisible, except that his teachers really liked him. He was friends with a lot of the smart kids, but also with the jocks, and his best friends were from his youth group from all over the U.S.</p>
<p>He never advertised his class rank. At the high school students were given their own rank but a list was not published.</p>
<p>He got in to his top 20 dream school with very strong grades and scores. Several others in his class had applied there as well, one other was accepted (ended up at state flagship with top scholarship) and all the others had been waitlisted or rejected there.</p>
<p>One obnoxious mother came up to me at Senior Awards Night and demanded my son’s gpa and scores asking me “Where the H///LL did he come from? How did he get in and not my daughter? I am SURE she was a better student than him and we never even talked about him as competition!”</p>
<p>Can you believe it?</p>
<p>My son just did his own thing and didn’t compete with any one other than himself.</p>
<p>Sadly, I do believe it.</p>
<p>Perhaps that woman’s daughter was half as obnoxious as the mother–that may be one reason she was rejected. </p>
<p>Good for your son for achieving without the drama of public competition.</p>
<p>It’s rude to ask others (student or parents) this question - none of their business. Aggressive people will try anything but that doesn’t mean you have to answer! It’s like a stranger banging on the front door of your residence, demanding to be let in - you DON’T have to open the door to such a person (aggressive peddlers/solicitors/criminals prey on the GOODWILL of the average person, which in this case is misplaced if the person complies. “Competitive” parents need to chill.</p>
<p>Yes, it’s rude to ask. I would probably come back with one of these responses (all said with a knowing, pleased smile):</p>
<p>“Good enough to get in [X College], we hope!”
“Well, let’s just say we’re all very happy with how well he/she did.”
“My S/D doesn’t want to brag about it, so we don’t have his/her permission to say.”</p>
<p>I would assume that anyone asking would realize that any further questions would be considered intrusive.</p>
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Partial credit.</p>
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My son was a little like this–good grades, and very good scores, but perhaps not on the radar screen of others in terms of competition for tops schools. I actually felt that he should leak his scores so people (including teachers) wouldn’t underestimate him.</p>
<p>As for the general question, I think there’s personal and cultural variation in how people think about privacy–and some people are just rude and clueless. I think it’s better to deflect the question politely if you don’t want to answer.</p>
<p>I will say this–I would sure like to have known the grades, scores, accomplishments, and college plans of all the other kids in my daughter’s program–it might have helped in developing a college list and in strategizing where to apply early. (Yeah, I know that supposedly you’re not competing with others from your school–past experience, at least at this school, does not really support that idea.)</p>
<p>boysx3, at my son’s graduation, the mother of one of his classmates came up to me and said that her daughter was upset that my son “had taken her spot at Northwestern”. At first I thought she was joking, but she was serious.</p>
<p>Quite valiant for people to post their vital statistics here so we can associate that information with an anonymous screen alias.</p>
<p>I suspect most people might be a bit more reluctant, and rightly so, to post personal information if anyone actually knew who they were. And even more so with respect to their child.</p>
<p>OTOH, I don’t consider test scores to be particularly personal information. Some people are just open about things like that. Nobody has to answer - I don’t think it’s particularly rude to ask, and certainly not particularly rude to refuse to answer.</p>
<p>We have found that the kids themselves ask these questions. </p>
<p>Last May, D2 was asked by a peer (who had taken the ACT that Feb with her) to share scores. They are friends, are in student govt and NHS together, are both high achievers and tend to fly under the rader, so D felt secure trading scores with this person. </p>
<p>Last week a kid she didn’t know from Adam come up to D in the library and asked “Are you XXX? I hear you are really smart. How much studying did you do to get the XX score on the ACT?” Needless, to say, she was floored. She asked this kid how he knew her score, and he said everyone knew and was talking about it. She was mortified. This is a large public HS; who knows how many “everyone” is. She feels exposed and sabotaged.</p>
<p>So this kind of thing isn’t restricted to parents.</p>
<p>At my kids’ high school, many (but not all) kids share scores.</p>
<p>But she never intended for her scores to be broadcast schoolwide. She didn’t return the favor with her friend’s score.</p>
<p>Hunt: agreed – “I will say this–I would sure like to have known the grades, scores, accomplishments, and college plans of all the other kids in my daughter’s program–it might have helped in developing a college list and in strategizing where to apply early.”</p>
<p>How else are you supposed to establish a benchmark? I don’t think you can assume that everything will work out in the end for your high stats kid without having some sort of frame of reference with which to begin – especially with admissions to highly selective schools being such a crap shoot. For us, that frame of reference has been more of a correlation between past years’ college acceptances and GPA/class rank (public knowledge) and test scores (sometimes volunteered by students, sometimes asked for by parents).</p>