After reading lorene’s thread in MPSIMS, it brought to mind my “grade-skipping” experience.
I’m curious about other Dopers’ experiences with skipping a grade.
I understand it’s not very common practice anymore…
I skipped my sophmore year of HS. It helps that I changed HS’s at the end of my freshman year, so I just came in as a junior at my new HS. I had been taking advanced classes since 7th grade, so it was pretty easy for. I had to take a couple of correspondence courses to get enough credits to graduate, but I made it pretty easily. I graduated in 1998 btw, so I don’t know if I could still do that today.
I skipped 7th grade, when my parents moved. It was pretty much a non-event.
Graduated in 2004.
I think it’s harder on kids who stay at the same school when skipped, because they have to reintegrate in an all-new, older “peer” group.
I skipped junior high and finished senior high. Worked great. Got to go on to college earlier than I should have, but I was ready. Too ready, actually. Everyone else was all, “mommy and daddy are paying” and I was all “my friends got knocked up and are paying for their kids; you’re spoiled.”
My dad had a college degree by 15 or 16 or so. He’s an asshole. Kids, don’t do that.
In the third grade, after having moved 2000 miles, they considered skipping me up to the 5th grade. But after a very brief failed experiment, it was decided that I wasn’t mature enough to handle it.
Probably a wise decision.
I skipped kindergarten, which sounds like nothing but really I wasn’t very socially advanced to start with, so it was probably a bad idea on the one hand. I had a very hard time socially.
On the other hand, I got in trouble all through elementary and middle school because I was still bored. So being with my proper grade would have been hellishly worse on that front. I never have decided if it was really a good idea or not.
In the middle of grade one, they yanked me out of story period, trotted me over to another room, and dumped me into a grade-two class.
Thinking about it much later, this may have had a deep effect on me socially. Because I was a year younger than most kids, simply because of my age and state of development, I was always smaller, weaker, and less co-ordinated than most kids in the class. I am now sure that this reinforced my tendencies to introversion, my lack of social skills, and my tendency to hang back in social situations. Perhaps if the change had been in high school, it wouldn’t have had as much of an effect, but younger kids grow more rapidly.
The yanking would have been the school year of 1969/70. I never even got to hear the end of the story.
I started school in the UK, and was a year ahead in 6th grade. Once we moved to the US it was decided by the Principal of the school I was starting that I needed to be put back ‘with my own age group’. Given the difference between the educational system in the UK and the US, I ended up bored shitless and got in lots of trouble. I think that pretty well set the stage for the rest of my US school days so I ended up my high school days skipping every day & going surfing.
I skipped 7th grade. The school made the transition easier by having me take two 7th-grade classes during my 6th-grade year, so I wouldn’t be dumped into 8th grade not knowing anyone. Academically it worked out fine, but my best friendship all through elementary school, with a neighbor who was always in the same class as me, faded away, I guess because we were no longer in any classes together.
Sort of…
I was young for my grade to start with. In fifth grade, through an odd number of circumstances, I ended up going to school for something like 30 days. So I “sort of” skipped fifth grade. But since we moved schools (one of the circumstances) I was simply enrolled in fifth grade.
(The odd circumstances were two cross country moves, one teachers strike, a series of illness - including two weeks of tonsillitis, one 1970s style energy crisis that shut down the school for a month (they were going to make it up in the Spring - maybe they did - we moved).
The ‘skipping’ of fifth grade was a non-event. Being the youngest in my class by a full month was hard. My kids are both near the oldest in their classes - we held my son (made the cutoff by two days) and didn’t push my daughter - missed the cuttoff by 20 days (although she was reading pre-K and we could have made a case to enroll her).
I skipped one in grade school, but I don’t remember which anymore. I did all four grades of high school in two years, though, so I was done at fifteen. That worked out surprisingly well—the following year, I entered college, and I just graduated in May of this year. It wasn’t hard, either.
They wanted to skip me after 1st grade (mostly because of my reading skills–what else do you do in 1st grade?) but my mother would not allow it. I think that’s what turned me off school later on. I felt terrible that a classmate was allowed to skip ahead but I was not, and then I was bored and not at all challenged for the rest of my school career. Eventually, I ended up skipping grades 8-12 and tutoring myself in chemistry :D.
It wasn’t considered skipping, but I graduated a year early in high school. I had enough credits at the end of my junior year where all I had to do was pass the state constitution class (a four week class) my senior year. It worked out for me as I got to go with my girl friend to visit her family in England. It was quite a trip as we got too see a lot of western Europe ( I had a lot more fun then when I had gone with my father previously).
I skipped a grade (as you call it) in primary school. The school was actually suggesting I move to a gifted students school but my parents didn’t have the money for that and wanted me to have a ‘normal’ childhood.
I continued to do well at school, but not very well at university. I don’t think that was due to skipping a grade though, as it was because I’d never learned any study skills, having been able to do a quick cram the night before an exam throughout high school.
For a sec there, I thought you were me. But I always liked school. 
I was already young, a December kid, so Mom said no. What they did was allow me access to the school library. I remember the teacher taking just me there once a week, so that I could choose any book I wanted!
I skipped the first grade, which would have been my 1987-88 year. I had attended two years of pre-kindergarten, and then while in kindergarten I was enrolled in my school’s gifted program and was often asked to go and read books to the nearby first grade class. I remember feeling segregated from the rest of my kindergarten class during standardized testing because I was placed at a single desk off in a corner while the rest of the kids took their tests at large group tables.
When I hit second grade I was still 6 years old (November baby). I was smaller and didn’t know anyone, but I didn’t have any problems with the kids that I can recall. My academic issues began in third grade, when I got totally bored with the curriculum and the twice-weekly gifted classes weren’t enough to occupy my mind. That’s also when I began to have issues with my understanding of math. Between 3rd and 4th we moved from Alabama to an excellent school system in Georgia, and I improved in my studies again to the point where I got a little too comfortable. Stayed in gifted programs through 8th grade, but my poor study habits precluded me from taking any advanced classed onc e I got to high school. I was still bored silly with language arts and history, and hadn’t yet received the instruction I needed in math, so things went downhill and I stopped caring about my grades. I heard the sentence “You need to apply yourself!” so many times that the phrase lost its meaning, and by the beginning of my first junior year (of three begun) I had only accumulated eleven credits and never got any more. I dropped out for the last time in 1998 and got my GED the next summer.
I don’t blame my poor performance in school on skipping the grade, but I do think that it’s way too easy for the intelligent kids to become overconfident in their abilities, especially when a big fuss is made over them at an early age. It took me much too long to figure out that not everything would come easy in my life, and by the time I did, it was too late for me to salvage the damage I had done.
I skipped third grade, and changed schools at the same time. I went from a public school with ~30 kids in the class to a private school with ~9 kids in the class. It was pretty traumatic for me, and I sorta wish my parents hadn’t done it. Part of it was the catch-up: I was supposed to have been learning a few things during the summer, primarily my multiplication tables. My mother half-heartedly worked on them with me, but I didn’t learn them, and one of the first things the teacher did was test us on multiplication and I failed a test for the first time in my life. Mind you, I was used to getting As without even trying, and it was horrible to actually fail a test.
But worse than that was the socializing. All of a sudden, the girls were interested in the boys in the class. I was physically in the same league, but I was still a kid and they were almost pre-teens. That was the hardest part.
Still, I’m not sure it would have been great for me not to have skipped. I still pretty much glided through school without studying much, and the social issues got worked out in a year or two. But it was rough at first.
I skipped the first grade (around 1966). Like Sunspace, I was yanked up out of class one day and deposited in a 2nd grade class the next day. The most I remember about it was that I could read when I started school; and that I took two achievement tests which each took a whole day. What I remember about the tests is that the lady administering them gave me a mini-chocolate bar after each test.
I was behind all the other kids in social growth, but I was kind of a nut anyway so I don’t think it hurt me really. I took a break in the middle of college, so I didn’t end up finishing any faster than the other kids anyway. Matter of fact, with getting married and starting a family, it ended up being 10 years after HS graduation when I finally got my BS from Uni.
I didn’t skip a grade, but I started school early, so I was always the youngest in the class.
I was able to keep up and was always in the upper percentile of my class, but I think I had to work at it a lot harder than I might have had I waited a year. I didn’t fit in well, but was sorta oblivious to how much of an outcast I was.
No one can say if holding me back a year before starting would have made a difference, but I believe it would have.