Did you ever skip a grade in school? What was your experience. How did it affect college/adult life?
Skipped kindergarten. Kindergarten was one half day. My parents didn’t want to pay for a sitter, so they fudged my birth date. And I went directly to first grade. I remember I peed my pants in first grade. I should have learned not to do that in kindergarten.
At the end of my junior year in high school, I had sufficient credits to graduate. So, I went off to college at age 16. I missed out on building relationships in my senior year. Something I regret. But, I worked all during high school, so I didn’t have much of a social life there.
Entering college at 16 was a challenge. Probably not a big deal for a female. But for a male, it created problems on the dating scene.
I don’t recommend skipping grades.
I lived right next door to the one-room country school, so when the pupils went out for recess I joined
them. Finally let me come inside. No such thing as kindergarten. 1 room school is pretty much at your own pace, so I never noticed anything difficult, etc. No difference when I got to the central school in junior high.
Not skipping a grade, but starting early. If we had had graduation in May I’d have still been 16.
I skipped 6th and 12th. What had a really big effect on me was going off to college at 16, 3000 miles from home. I was totally not ready for that. If I’d gone to the local university while still living at home, I think I would have handled it a lot better. As it was, I went off the rails and dropped out after three semesters. I did go back eventually (and graduated at 26) but I’ve always had regrets about how long it took me.
I basically skipped 11th grade. 
Yes. Second grade. I do not recommend that parents do this; any advantages the child may experience early on will be overshadowed by much bigger problems farther down the line.
I originally skipped 1st grade, but just a few months later, we moved to a new town, and they insisted on putting me back in my “right” grade.
In math, though, I ended up effectively skipping two grades, and was taking night courses in Linear Algebra and Abstract Algebra at our local community college while still in high school.
I skipped third grade. I can’t really say it was a big deal on the social side of school, since I wasn’t exactly a social butterfly back then anyway. I do remember being a little lost at the beginning of fourth grade, though. Turns out that third grade was when everyone else learned how to tell time, and mastered the multiplication tables. None of the adults involved thought about that, I guess. I pretty much had to learn all that on my own, and eventually got up to speed with what was going on in fourth grade.
The only lasting effect is that I still have to mentally recite multiplication in my head (8, 16, 24, etc.) if I’m ever faced with a math problem in real life, even today. And yes, I still have to mentally calculate 5, 10, 15, etc., if I’m faced with a non-digital clock. And I just realized as I’m typing this that telling time involves multiplying! :smack:
In spite of my multiplication impediment, I’ve got no regrets about skipping. I went on to taking advanced classes throughout my school years, to the point where I was sent to my town’s high school to take math classes because the middle school I attended didn’t have any classes at my level.
Oddly enough, none of that carried over to college, where I was just an average student. I think I just got bored by that point…plus I discovered that partying was more fun than studying!
Oh, and no, I didn’t major in anything even remotely related to math. 
I assume that this was supposed to be in IMHO, since I can’t see how it’d relate to any of the columns. I’ll let the mods know, so they can move it.
I didn’t skip a grade, but when I was in 1st grade, I was such a good reader that they sent me up to a 2nd grade class for the reading portion of the day. I had learned to read before entering kindergarten, and I’m told by family members that I could even read newspapers before entering school. I was, in fact, a better reader even than the kids in the 2nd grade class, but it was certainly more interesting than being with the first graders. The problem was, some of the first graders became jealous over the arrangement, which caused social problems for me (and, I’ll admit that, being an only child, I might have acted a bit superior about it too, which aggravated the situation).
As it was, I had started school early (I graduated high school at 17 and 4 months) and while I had the intellect for it, I was rather immature compared to most of the kids in my class. This persisted throughout my school career; when the boys and girls were starting to get interested in each other, I wasn’t there yet. And it was harder for me to catch up later on. I behaved more childishly than most of the other kids. It was all-around not a good idea for me to start school so early, but my father was convinced that I was a genius and could keep up (I have a high IQ but not quite at genius level). And I could have, academically, but by the time I got to high school, my relative immaturity and certain family issues had caused me such social problems that I was rather depressed, hated school, and got poor grades as a result.
Skipped second grade. But right after moving (well not right after, there were a couple of miserable months in second grade). After that, most of my really good friends were a year younger throughout grade school–a couple of exceptions (including two other kids who also skipped). Once I got into junior high/high school, it seemed that my very best friends were either a couple of grades behind or a couple of grades ahead. By the time I got to college, I don’t know if there was any difference or not, because how could I tell?
But this all might have happened anyway. I could see my gravitating to the same people no matter what grade I was in.
I was one of the last people in my class to get a driver’s license, and I was in driver’s ed with people who were mostly in the class below. I was 17 when I started college, but there were younger people.
Now I should add here that due to the timing of my birthday, I was too young to start kindergarten where I lived at age five, and then pretty much on the cusp in the state I lived in in 2nd grade, and so it was never all that big a deal. If I hadn’t skipped I would have been one of the older people in the class, but if I’d started kindergarten in that state I’d have been that grade ahead anyway (and if I’d started in that state I probably wouldn’t have been advanced enough to skip. For example, in third grade kids were already writing in cursive. I had learned that in first grade, and was prohibited from using cursive in second grade).
My younger brother skipped a grade, and it didn’t do him any favors so far as I can tell. He didn’t finish college etc. I only learned a few months ago that schools suggested that I skip a grade too - twice! - but they’d decided against it because I was already one of the youngest in my grade and very small for my age. My brother, the other hand had gone to what NH used to call “Readiness” which was a grade between kindergarten and first grade for kids who probably weren’t going to be successful in first grade at six (lots of kids like him with ADHD etc), so he was a year older than many of the kids in his class until he skipped a grade.
I’m happy I didn’t skip. I probably would’ve benefited from being a little older going into college, not even younger.
I didn’t skip, but wish strongly that I had. I think it would have helped me with a lot of the problems I had with school.
There’s plenty of research on skipping grades now, and it points heavily toward its benefits for qualifying students.
Is this question linked to a Cecil column?
It was recommended that I be skipped from 1st grade to 4th grade, but my parents insisted I’d miss out on social interaction and that was more important.
So I spent my years at school knowing all the answers, bored out of my mind, and with a group of students I *still *didn’t fit in with. There was no benefit to me to not skip ahead.
I started making friends in high school, when the rest of the students finally caught up with where I was at. The one-size-fits-all approach to schooling makes sure that people don’t get ahead, they end up at the same level or they drop out. It’s pretty terrible.
I attended grade school at a laboratory school attached to a major university’s education department. There were four of us who had started school knowing how to read, print,and do math and science, thanks to academic parents who did the early '60s equivalent of home schooling. Because we were so far ahead of our classmates as first graders, the school pulled us out of our class and created a custom classroom for us. We were given an accelerated curriculum and by the end of the school year, we were deemed ready for fourth grade rather than second.
Academically, the experience was both stimulating and appropriate. We were well prepared for the work we were doing as fourth graders. Socially, it was strange and confusing. Thankfully, through eighth grade, we had each other. We clung together as a little group and didn’t mix much socially with our new classmates. Had we not been a group of four, this might have been an easier social transition. Realizing just this, the school did not skip students as groups after their experiment with us.
As we grew, socially it was easier for me as a girl than it was for my three male friends. For example, while it didn’t hamper me much not being able to drive until after I graduated from high school, it was tough on the boys for whom that was an important rite of passage. Also, I could date boys in my class. They weren’t even close to ready to date girls two years older than they were. The boys didn’t have the body development to participate in many sports, and I struggled to keep up with my peers in my sports as well. The boys mostly spent their time with boys in the year behind them.
Sadly, the social pressure may have been too much for one of our group who committed suicide at the age of 15. Since he left no explanation, there is no way to know if this was tied to the skip, but it’s tough to imagine that the disruption caused by the skip wasn’t a contributing factor.
The first year of college was rough. I was faced with situations and choices that I was not mature enough to handle alone. Fortunately, I found a valuable friend in my sorority’s house mother. She was a retired high school teacher and very savvy about the issues I was experiencing. Academically, it was still a great fit. I was very ready for college level instruction and study.
Years later, I was approached about skipping my son from first to third grades. Remembering the struggles of my male classmates, I declined. We moved him to a charter school and enrolled him in enrichment programs to forestall academic boredom, but we kept him with his class.
Reported for forum change.
Skipped from 6th grade to 8th. Can’t think of anything negative to say about it.
The only course I missed where there was a sequential knowledge build was pre-algebra. My father was the teacher for that course; he ran over everything I needed to know over the summer, and I started 8th-grade algebra better prepared than anyone in the class. (They’d had all summer to forget everything, not to mention the disadvantage of not getting a 1:1 teacher/student ratio.) That was a pretty unique situation, obviously.
OK, one issue that did come up later was that starting college at 17 made me ineligible for the normal work-study job in the cyclotron that they assigned physics students to. (I couldn’t legally sign the consent forms regarding the radiation hazards.) Plus, I couldn’t legally drink until about a month before I graduated. (Well, I thought it was an issue.) That’s all I can think of.
I was skipped over two separate semesters, but I forget exactly which ones. One was half of fifth grade, and I think the other one was half of third grade or something like that. The upside was that I bypassed the two most notoriously strict teachers in school, because it was a small school and everyone was normally bound to be in every teacher’s classroom at one time or another. The downside was that I was bad at math, and instead of finding a way to get me into it or somehow solve the problem, they swept that under the carpet. I stayed bad in math, and behind, all through the rest of school, eventually barring me from studying the things I would have liked to study.
I’m a lot more receptive to math now, but at the time I just wasn’t ready.
Third grade. When we moved to Florida, I tested into fifth grade. :eek: I was smalll for my age and shy, so my parents said no way was I moving into fifth grade. They put me into fourth grade and gifted instead. It was fine, I didn’t have any problems since I was with all other “nerdy” kids who were weird and skinny and wore glasses and such.