<p>Following Mom2PG: at least that’s where a U comes in. He can explore lateral opportunities that could take him into the tech world, without the specific demands of engineering. </p>
<p>Has this student been evaluated for a disability? I’m only asking because if he needs any accommodations in college, he will need a current evaluation documenting his issues.</p>
<p>Any chance you could contact the schools,where he applied for engineering and ask that he be moved to undeclared? </p>
<p>thumper, we didn’t think about undeclared. Oh well! He was adamant at the time. He can be, er, strongly opinionated.</p>
<p>No worries about being brutally honest, Mom. We’ve had that talk many times. I 100% agree with you. He just needed to see how pre-calc went…and now we know. Which is why he’s shifting to music/arts, etc. for his last schools that don’t have specific design majors.</p>
<p>Very frustrating to have disabilities and strengths in the same area. We call that twice exceptional, and he certainly is that.</p>
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<p>This is a bad sign for his success in calculus. The student really needs his trig facts at his fingertips to succeed in calculus.</p>
<p>Sorry for the rough times with your dog. Terrible timing for you with everything. </p>
<p>Do you think he could contact the schools and switch? That would be UCLA, SLO, UCSD and SDSU. (He’s already been admitted to SDSMT and Missouri S&T) Is that possible?</p>
<p>I would <em>love</em> it if he could do that! UCSD has Computing and the Arts major that requires Calc I. Not sure what the other schools offer. To be honest, we didn’t really see anything exciting at SDSU. And SLO, well, you can transfer into LAES after your sophomore year. UCLA had the wonderful arts/design/animation major, but he didn’t go for it and chose engineering instead.</p>
<p>I see it’s possible at UCLA, so I would assume it’s possible at the other schools, as well.</p>
<p>Ok, we’re talking about it now! I would feel so much better if he’d get out of engineering!</p>
<p>Another issue is that many universities do not allow any calculators in their introductory cal and physics courses. </p>
<p>He also eally needs to understand just how related CS and math are. </p>
<p>Good luck finding a school. But, I would suspect that you need to alter his plans. His level of math when applying as a STEM student is probably sending up red flags about his application. If he could change his major, it might help.</p>
<p>That could be, Mom. Thanks everyone for your input. At least for the five UC/Cal State schools (including UCI), it looks like he can change his major before Jan. 31.</p>
<p>Onward and upward!</p>
<p>Good…change that intended major. He can declare a major later on. Don’t let his major choice be an obstacle to admissions. </p>
<p>Also, watch out how you describe the disability in your rec. Colleges don’t need to know the hurdle, alone. They need to feel assured a kid overcomes hurdles.</p>
<p>He thinks gaming sounds like fun, but there are a million other things that sound good too. School is for exploring. Don’t dismiss schools that don’t have the exact thing he thinks he wants right now because he’s a teenager and things change.</p>
<p>You listed a dozen schools on his list. You know what this searching is all about since you have a son at MIT and must have gone through this a few years ago (did he get a full COA scholarship? If not, why are you so surprised that this second child didn’t?). I think it is time to be satisfied with your list and just realize there are no sure things, no perfect schools. If your son scored so high on the SAT, he is not missing basic math skills. Sometimes things are just HARD and you have to work to achieve good grades. If he gets accepted to a San Diego school, he can live at home. If to an LA area school, he can borrow for R&B or take the train every day. That would be very inconvenient, but we had kids at our high school in Orange county who took the train to school every day from San Diego and from LA. It can be done.</p>
<p>Sorry to hear about your dog.
With a 750 SAT math score, and a 730 SAT Math II score, I am not seeing a math disability. Did I miss something?
Did he have extra time on the test?
I know OP cited a particular test on which the student had good comprehension but poor computation. Not sure what test that was, but if that just happened one time, and other scores have been good, even if grades haven’t been straight A’s, I wouldn’t write off all the math-heavy majors yet… A couple of my kids each had a disturbing score on district/state standardized tests. ( A students getting 15-20% scores on one test) and the teacher said not to worry–the kids must have messed up something on the test. I heard somewhere that a majority of working US engineers had SAT math scores below 600. Can’t find the source-- but not all engineering/tech schools are ultra-competitive. If a 700+ kid can’t cut it, who can? Fwiw, my S is CS major at UTD (will be senior in Jan). His SAT score was the same as your son’s, but with 20 points lower in math. He took AP Calc BC as a hs junior and did not understand the material second semester-- bombed the AP test. He took AP stats as a hs senior. In college he placed into Calc I and just continued from there. He has had a lot of math and some physics classes required for his major, but he works very hard and has about a 3.8 overall. He had very little CS/programming experience and had to take the “intro” course, which many test out of. Starting at the beginning didn’t hurt him, though.<br>
Perhaps your son could continue teaching cello lessons to earn $ during college?</p>
<p>atomom, wouldn’t the student be deciding on majors not the parent?</p>
<p>I believe in the math disability because my son seems to have a similar disability. High SAT scores-- he was an NMSQT semi finalist, 790 on Math II SAT, and yet he crashed and burned in calculus all three (!) times he tried it.</p>
<p>But is that a disability, to not do well in one subject? I knew people in high school who did fine in algebra but couldn’t understand geometry.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is a disability to not be perfect in everything. Some people can tap dance but not ballet. Do they have a disability in dance? No.</p>
<p>It is not popular these days to say that a student is simply not good at something. It has to be re-interpreted as a disability. There used to be student who got B’s, C’s and D’s. That has become unacceptable. There are so many levels of classes student now expect they should get As and 100s in their classes and if not, they drop down a level until they can. That is good. There are classes for every level of student in every topic. GPA is not longer indicative of anything but students are not hindered as they used to be. But a negative outcome is that A’s are expected and short of that, and the student has a disability. A student who does not get calculus has a “disability” (what happened in algebra, trig, geometry, etc-no disability? Just happened on him?) Maybe he sucks at calculus. But to even hint at the idea that a child who is in calculus has a math disability is simply absurd. It would be like saying a triathlon competitor who came in with the middle of the pack in swimming but close to the top in running has a physical disability. No, he is a slow swimmer. To call doing poorly in calculus a disability is to corrupt the term and intent of the disabilities act entirely. Anyone with a 790 in Math does not have a math disability of any sort. He may not be good at calculus. That’s ok. I’m sure he is “gifted” in other areas of academics. Same for the OP’s son. There is no evidence of any disability. Not everyone is uniformly good at everything.</p>
<p>If the OP’s son has this problem, it’s irrelevant whether we call it a disability or something else. If the kid struggles in math classes, he’s going to have a tough time in a major that requires a lot of math.</p>
<p>As to my son, lostaccount, you don’t know what you are talking about. He is in fact disabled-- how I wish he wasn’t! He has a developmental disability, Aspergers. As with a lot of spectrum kids, his IQ subtests are all over the map. When he took the WAIS, he was in the 99th percentile for one of the subtests, and the 0.3 percentile for another. That’s the zero point three percentile, not a typo. I didn’t even know they reported results that low. It was some visual test or other, and I think the average blind person could have scored better. </p>
<p>It was the discrepancy between his reasoning and his calculation that caused him to have an official diagnosis.</p>
<p>You must understand just what it’s taken him to get here. Remember, he not only has a math whiz brother who tutored him daily through his AoPS Alg I class, but we have another young math whiz friend who has tutored him through Alg II, Trig, and Pre-calculus. He met with his friend probably every two weeks online and sometimes twice a week.</p>
<p>Now, SAT math is just mostly reasoning. My oldest son taught him a simple trick of just going over the last 10 questions of 3-4 practice math tests from the blue book, and just concentrating on those. I mean, it’s not rocket science, the SAT math. My son is <em>very</em> good at reasoning. </p>
<p>As for the SAT II, he took it while he was taking pre-calculus and he had tutoring by his friend to help prepare for the test. We are talking a <em>lot</em> of one on one tutoring to get this far.</p>
<p>So, if someone doesn’t like to call it a disability (and yes, he has accommodations through College Board and did have time and a half for both SAT and SAT II tests), that doesn’t bother me. I have lived with this son and <em>never</em> thought I would see the day when he could even do this much math. He didn’t do math for probably 2-3 years between 6th and 8th. We found a lovely curriculum, Mathematical Reasoning Through Verbal Analysis, that was so wonderful for him: he got to use his reasoning skills, but never had to do any calculating! Well, unfortunately, he had to enter the real world eventually, and thus, AoPS Algebra was his first real (and really difficult) high school math class.</p>
<p>Oh, and he learned long division for the first time this year while doing pre-calculus…Don’t think he ever memorized multiplication tables, either.</p>
<p>I don’t know whether he has hit a wall or not. He’s registered for Calc I next semester; we shall see. It will be 14 units of hard college classes-Calc, Java, Italian II (he doesn’t care for foreign language)-but it’s good prep for a four year college.</p>
<h1>171 ???</h1>
<p>I was addressing other posters who suggested that the student give up on engineering/CS or other math-heavy majors. (Yes, of course I understand that students choose their own majors. This discussion is among parents, however.)</p>
<p>Now that the OP explained what help her son has had, (thanks for the explanation) I see that math-heavy majors may not be for him. He would probably need tutors through his math classes in college, too. (They are available.)</p>
<p>Simple, knowing what I wanted to major in, I chose the most local state university which is not only very affordable, but also guaranteed admission to local students meeting the GPA requirements. </p>
<p>Their engineering program actually is really good for the price I’m paying and should guarantee me a job in a high demand field :)</p>
<p>Only had to apply to this school and UC Berkeley’s EECS just to see if I would get in because I knew what I was doing well ahead of time and knew I could get into the school / afford it entirely with no debt.</p>