Self-study for 7th and 8th graders

EarlVanDorn
Tue, 25 Sep 2012 02:50:57 +0000

OP here with a few comments. First, as I mentioned, I am leaning against encouraging my daughter to take an AP exam this year. She’s in 7th grade and has a full plate with several extra-curricular activities.

As for my son, he doesn’t have a lot of activities and wants to tackle this. He made a 24 on the ACT as a 7th grader last year, which is a good score. It put him at the 94th percentile of all Duke Tip participants, who in turn represent roughly the top seven percent or so of seventh graders. A 24 on the ACT is considered “college ready” by the College Board.

Add to this that my son has a November birthday. He really should be in the 9th grade, but they changed the rules at some point to require that children be 6 before entering school rather than 6 before Jan. 1. In the “olden” days the smarter kids with Sept.-Dec. birthdays would start school at age 5 while the slower kids would wait a year. I had several fraternity brothers and other friends who were only 17 when I started college and knew a few 16-year-olds, but today the emphasis is on keeping everyone back to made the slower children feel better about themselves.

I’ve looked at the sample questions put out by the College Board and by the Princeton Review, and roughly half of the questions are just general knowledge questions that most people should know without ever opening a textbook. Mastering the other half will take some work, but is very doable.

Remember, one of the goals that every student should have is to get the National Scholar award. Obviously this needs to be earned by the end of the junior year. Getting it any later is a useless as teats on a boar hog. So students must either take 2-3-3 in the Freshman, Sophomore and Junior year and get a four on every test, or else take a test or two before entering ninth grade to get some breathing room. Obviously taking one of the easier tests, or even two, as an eighth-grader makes this a much easier task.

Slightly off thread, but when I was in school I had at least one study hall every day. Now study hall is abolished. But during study hall, which was held in the library, I would read the nearest major daily newspaper cover to cover, plus a number of magazines. I learned as much from reading the newspaper as I did from any of my classes.