Minor pissing about my daughter's high school

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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My daughter is a junior in high school this year. She is (and has been since she was a freshman) in all “Honors” and “Advanced Placement” classes. For all of known history (ok, maybe a stretch, but fuckit, it’s my post) these classes have been “weighted” – meaning that a C in an AP class was worth an A in a standard class. There was an incentive for taking classes that worked you to death, stressed your ass through the roof and left you with no time for friends, family and video games. Not anymore. As of next year (her senior year) there will be no more weighting – instead, she will get a whopping 5 points added to her final grade in the class for honors or AP classes.

Now, having always been in those classes myself, I know that it’s not always about the weighting (I mean, nothing’s better than an A, so if you gets A’s in those classes, it’s not like it means any more than an A in another class), sometimes it’s about actually, I donno, being stimulated, but still.

My daughter was ranting about it, and I don’t blame her. She said, “you know, next year, I think I shall just take all standard classes. That way, you know I will get straight A’s and I won’t have to do crap!” I hate to say it, but I see her point and almost agree with her. What’s the point of busting your ass when it doesn’t allow you to stand above the others? Oh, and I forgot to mention – the school is also not going to recognise the top 10% anymore either. Here I sit, a member of the top 10% of my graduating class thinking, “bloody fucking hell – what the fuck?”

I don’t get outraged over much, but this nanny state bullshit has got to stop. We can’t recognise the kids that are smarter or more talented or more athletic anymore because the Willy Lump Lumps of the world will have hurt feelings? UGH! You know what? My kids aren’t the best or the brightest or the most awesomely talented, but they work their asses off to be as good as they are at the things they do, and if – if by some twist of fate – they end up in the “best” category because of that hard work, byfuckinggawd, they deserve to be recognised for it!

Ahhhhh, I feel a lot better having gotten that off my chest. Mods, if this needs to be moved to the Pit, go for it. I honestly would love to spout vitriol the likes of which have not been seen over this, but I just don’t have the energy for it. However, I am sure someone will take issue with me regarding how I feel, so y’know, move the thread if need be.

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When I was in high school the weighted classes actually allowed you to get higher than a 4.0 gpa. The AP classes could count towards college credit if you scored high enough on the AP test, also. They eventually got of the weighted class thing, and then no one wanted to take the AP classes.

I agree, if there is no reason to work any harder, why bother?

3

To prepare you for college?

Her education certainly isn’t over. I’d take the AP classes, bust my ass for As and Bs, blow the SATs out of the water and get a ticket to a good college. Busting her ass now will pay dividends later. By taking the easy way out now, she could be in a world of hurt halfway through her first semester.

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If your daughter wants to get into a competitive college, she will continue to take AP classes. Whether the grades are weighted or not is not really relevant.

Your high school does not have a vested interest in reducing the likelihood that its top performers get into elite colleges. The school will probably just relax the rigor of AP classes so the same kids get roughly the same grades. This is nothing to get all that excited about. The purpose of high school is not to get better grades than everyone else. The grades are the means, not the end.

After all, if a given student can’t get an A in an AP class without inflation, perhaps he/she is not a good fit for a competitive college.

Canning special recognition is probably a good thing, too. Being in the top 10% of your class does not make you a unique snowflake. The smart kids will reap ample rewards in their own lives. A little pat on the head from high school is pretty insulting.

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I can move this if you want, Litoris, but for now I think it’s okay where it is. It’d be fine in IMHO or the Pit and I’ll move it depending on how it shapes up.

Is this such a big deal? I was against class ranking when I was in high school and I stood to benefit from it - after my year the school scaled back from telling every student his rank to just informing the top 10 percent, which I thought was a dumb compromise. What’s the point?

ETA: I agree about the AP classes. I don’t know how weighting worked in my school- I never bothered to ask because it seemed like a system that existed independently of anybody’s academic performance. I was in the AP courses because they were supposed to be more challenging and better preparation for college. If I’d managed things properly I could’ve graduated two semesters early, and they were more interesting classes.

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Why does the weighting matter? Colleges just unweight the grades anyway. So it is just about recognition in the HS, and really, who cares?

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This has always been a hot button for me. When I was in high school (early 80s) they had just started the AP program, so the only AP class I took was English. The grade wasn’t worth any more than a standard A, but depending on how well you scored on the AP test at the end of the year, you could get out of some early college classes. I got a 5 (of 5–one of only 2 in my school that year) and got out of the first year of intro English in college.

But in any case, back to the topic: I hate the fact that all the special and unique snowflakes out there who can’t handle the fact that they’re not as good at something as somebody else have made it so even the kinds of things that should be recognized (academic performance first–this is a school afterall–but also athletic, musical, artistic, and other sorts of performance) can’t be because some little hothouse flower might get his or her precious “self esteem” trampled.

Newsflash, bleeding hearts: Kids know when they’re not as good at something as other kids. Everybody knows who the best students, the best athletes, the most socially skilled, etc. are. There’s nothing wrong with self esteem–the problem is the way they’re trying to foster it. You can’t tell a kid that they’re good at something if they’re not. You’re just wasting your time and the kid’s. In my version of a perfect world, teachers would be instructed to keep an eye out for something that each kid was good at or interested in, and praise and encourage them for that, instead of decreeing that we can’t have valedictorians or team letters (or test scores, or athletic competitions with scoring!) anymore because somebody might get their feelings hurt.

Sorry. Like I said, this is a major hot button for me.

“But…if everybody’s special, no one is.” – The Incredibles

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I am really in a weird mindset with this – I agree with you that she should still take the classes, but mainly because I know that she will be bored out of her skull in the standard classes. At the same time, it pisses me off and if I were in her shoes, I’d probably be tempted to take an easy year. Ultimately, it’s her decision and I support her whichever way she goes.

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The APhistory and English classes at my school were nothing like the history/English classes most people take in college. The college classes are way easier.

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I, and most of my friends, found non-math AP classes to be noticeably easier than standard classes when it came to workload. More mentally challenging, sure, but they didn’t bother with the bullshit busywork they made you do in standard classes. Don’t let her think that she’ll be able to get A grades while phoning it in.

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That might be more of a function of where “most people” go to college.

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Sure, I understand where you’re coming from in your parental shoes. But like others have alluded to, I’d encourage her not to consider what the school is doing and keep on keeping on. She’s obviously a bright kid with a promising future ahead of her, so urge her to remain focused on that. This bullshit that the school is pulling will be a distant memory in no time flat.

Taking a year off will hurt her… guaranteed.

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I agree with what you’re saying about trying to fool kids, since adults generally give themselves too much credit for being able to trick them… but don’t get me started on THAT. I’ve never liked that argument.

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Boo fucking hoo.

I was in honors classes and AP classes my whole high school career and we only got 4 extra points for taking advanced classes. So if you fucked up and got a C, chances are a C would show up on your report card. Imagine!

Tell your daughter to suck it up and realize that what she was getting before was a gift. And if she’s getting C’s consistently in honors classes, there’s always the possibility that she doesn’t belong in honors classes.

I’m sorry for being harsh, but fuck, what a whiny entitled rant.

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That’s exactly why pecking order recognition is so worthless. Being good at something yields its own rewards. Most kids who get constant pats on the back for being in the top x% lack the perspective to accept this with sufficient perspective. They are constantly praised and told how exceptional they are.

This can have unhealthy side effects later in life when self-image and reality collide. Praise people for what they are good at, absolutely. Find the talent in each student and develop it. But useless class rank, boring and pompous valedictory speeches, and public recognition for SAT scores? Seriously.

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Depends on where you go to college and who your instructors are, I guess.

My undergraduate was in history and philosophy and thankfully my reading, writing and investigatory skills were sharp enough. Other students struggled mightily.

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At my school there were no class levels below honors and you had no CHOICE but to take AP classes, the only core subjects you could squeak out of without them are math (and that’s if you didn’t know algebra when you got in, highly unlikely given the entry requirements) and science (they added Honors Physics my senior year). They didn’t weight them or the GPA, and most colleges people were looking at only gave some gen ed credits but didn’t waive the requirements or didn’t take them at all (from what I found, most Ivy don’t take them at all and most good state colleges only take them as generic gen ed) if you got a 3 or above on the exam. My College (U of Arizona) is a bit weird in that it waives the course LEVEL but forces you to still get the credits (i.e. if you got a 5 on English Lit you test of of Eng101 and are put in 102, but you still only need to take exactly one English course either way).

We also didn’t have any Latin honors or recognize the top 10%, instead there were two awards names after alumni, one voted on by the students, and one voted on by the faculty (with nominations dependent on GPA and extracurriculars to some extent). Doesn’t go on any transcripts or anything though, you just get a pretty certificate and MIGHT be able to pass it off on a college resume with a sufficient letter explaining what it is.

In other news, tell your daughter to take it anyway. Trust me, 4 years of straight AP on Honors makes college boring (for those that know me, yes I’m a freshman, but I have this on authority from even the bad kids I knew my freshman year that are about to graduate, it’s pretty snoozeworthy and they’ve been getting amazing grades). Or she could work on extracurriculars I suppose, but your senior year is usually pretty irrelevant as far as admissions go because you usually don’t even have a semester done (or do but not enough time between now and then to write about it) by the time most applications are due so she might as well get some training in and breeze through most of college.

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They inflated your grade by two whole letters with no extra benefit for actually getting an A? Jeebus, that’s just crazy. I mean, what was to stop people from taking the AP course, slacking off and doing the bare minimum to get a C, and then it going down on their GPA just like they’d been busting ass all year? (And yeah, I went to school with plenty of people who would have done just exactly that, because they were far more concerned about their GPA than, I don’t know, actually learning shit. And they were, by and large, badly suffering halfway through their first halfway challenging college class. But those people were also, by and large, assholes, so I felt not the tiniest spark of sympathy for them.)

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I’m a little confused - where I grew up, regardless of whether how an AP class was weighted, if you wanted to use them to get college credit or somehow increase your GPA or standing when colleges were considering their candidates, you had to take the AP test. And if you did well on the AP test, colleges regarded you differently than if you didn’t. But to take the test in the first place, you had to take the AP classes. So that itself was enough incentive for most kids to take the classes and try to do well.

And how does the AP classification affect overall percentage with regard to academic performance? That doesn’t seem quite fair that someone who got a C (even if it is AP) should be given credit for a 4.0 when they did not, in fact, get one. Am I completely misunderstanding? I’m not trying to be snarky - I’m just confused.

For what it’s worth, I went to a small private school where you had to test in just to be admitted, so I’m not very familiar with the public school system. In our school it didn’t matter whether you were taking AP classes or not - getting all As was the only way you’d get a 4.0 and if you didn’t get all As, your GPA reflected that.

20

Ugh, while typing, I missed some of the new comments.

It’s not just this one issue. This is just the proverbial straw that has broken this camel’s back. They aren’t allowed to have “first chair” in band, either. They simply are not recognised for greatness in anything. Why does it matter? Because children need recognition to continue to have incentive to excel. I WANT to see kids try to excel. I hate to see kids with no motivation. Yeah, I know it’s up to me as a parent to encourage them, and I do.

As for college just un-weighting the grades, sure, it happens – but this isn’t as much about her college career as about teaching kids that there is a benefit (even in the short-term) to working hard.

And, before it’s brought up, yes, I do know that HS grades are not indicative of future happiness/success/etc – this isn’t as much about her future as her now.