High School Guide: Admissions, reviews, and advice

Susan James said:Personally, I'm glad medical schools have their own specific entrance exams🤷
so that we can be treated by high-quality doctors (assuming they don't all move to Dubai!) who actually stick to standards of excellence—standards that haven't completely fallen apart yet (besides, they struggle to fill their spots even though more people apply than there are openings).
My philosophy is simple: if you find the entrance exam too hard, you probably shouldn't be going to college anyway.

I'm all for individual entrance exams because I know exactly what kind of knowledge students from different universities are bringing to the table. I don't really have much insight into the schools outside of major cities like New York or Chicago.
But everyone acts like there's just one single national standardized test for everything.🤣

So, how does the ranking look? Is it Ford, HSBC, or maybe JPMorgan?

I’m not entirely sure how people are ranking these things lately, but it seems like some folks have this misguided idea that students at MIT or the College of Arts and Sciences are somehow less capable just because they relied on their high school diplomas rather than taking an entrance exam 😁

It’s a shame how this turned into STEM versus social sciences 😬

Unfortunately, by implementing the Bologna process and essentially turning universities into glorified high schools 🙄, you can clearly see the decline in the quality of engineers graduating from MIT

rowdypanther12 said:So, if you don't feel like studying, you just have to guess which year will have the worst students? 😂
It's honestly a mess. I don't get why everything in this country has to be made so complicated.🤔

The actual score on the national exit exam doesn't really matter much, because most of the points from that exam are calculated based on your overall percentage of correct answers.

For instance, at MIT: you get 240 points for physics (you basically take your percentage and multiply it by 240), and it works similarly for math, which is worth 360 points.

I wasn't talking about final grades at the end of the term or the year, but rather what happens during the school year itself.
For example, my kid had surgery and was out for two weeks due to health issues. He came back to a mountain of missed work. I'm not asking for handouts, but a little more empathy—maybe some leeway to catch up or just not being penalized with lower grades for stuff out of his control—was nowhere to be found.
The same thing happened when he had to quarantine for a week after catching something. He ended up with Cs and Ds because they wouldn't give him a chance to make up the work.
He’s in 7th grade, and all of this is going to tank his standing. I don't even want to think about how many points he'll lose.

When I read about everyone's kids crushing it—aiming for Harvard Law School or places like MIT or Toledo... I can't help but wonder where the kids go who don't have a perfect 4.0 GPA? Where do the kids land when they don't hit that minimum score for a top-tier prep school?
Do those kids even exist?

Jeffrey Edwards5 said:I have a quick question—for those of you with kids in 7th or 8th grade, have you noticed if they’ve tightened up the grading this school year? It feels like things got a lot stricter all of a sudden.

To be more specific, there are rumors going around that because of the massive wave of honor roll students and certain kids struggling to get into high school, local Elementary Schools were given instructions to grade much more harshly.

For example, at our local Elementary School, we parents of 7th graders were told by the homeroom teacher at the start of the year that the teachers had agreed not to give students a second chance to bump a B up to an A. Basically, unless a teacher is feeling extra generous, that's it.

Is anyone else seeing this, or is your child mentioning anything similar?

A little bit of pressure can actually work wonders. It might discourage some kids from constantly begging for better grades, or at least motivate them to study harder if they really want that A. It’s a decent way to kick off the school year.
It’s not a bad approach for the start of the term. 🧐

The issue isn't just about having too many honor roll students; it’s about the external assessments being conducted on a "representative sample" of 80 schools across America during the first week of May.
If your school is on that list, then I don't think it matters if it's a math teacher or someone at Duke Energy—the ranking of students who currently have straight As is going to be affected regardless...
And I haven't quite figured out from the announcements whether biology, physics, and chemistry will be one big exam or separate ones, but even the teachers must be worried about whether the kids who currently have straight As will actually pass these national tests with a 50% or a 95%.

Honestly, teachers should also be concerned about how their students perform on entrance exams for specialized math academies and later on standardized tests, but...
Until someone calls them out publicly...😉
I can just picture a high-level administrator reading data that a parent pulled from the online portal, showing correlations between success in Elementary School versus success on high school graduation exams, and then ranking schools by difficulty. I can see them losing their cool with their staff at Duke Energy, Math departments, or English departments, telling them that if kids' grades tank once they hit high school or graduation, they need to start giving more realistic grades before the enrollment period hits.

Jeffrey Edwards5 said:I wasn't talking about final grades at the end of the term or the year, but rather what happens during the school year itself.
For example, my kid had surgery and was out for two weeks due to health issues. He came back to a mountain of missed work. I'm not asking for handouts, but a little more empathy—maybe some leeway to catch up or just not being penalized with lower grades for stuff out of his control—was nowhere to be found.
The same thing happened when he had to quarantine for a week after catching something. He ended up with Cs and Ds because they wouldn't give him a chance to make up the work.
He’s in 7th grade, and all of this is going to tank his standing. I don't even want to think about how many points he'll lose.

When I read about everyone's kids crushing it—aiming for Harvard Law School or places like MIT or Toledo... I can't help but wonder where the kids go who don't have a perfect 4.0 GPA? Where do the kids land when they don't hit that minimum score for a top-tier prep school?
Do those kids even exist?

Well, here is mine. Definitely not part of the "genius club."
And honestly, I have no clue where they're supposed to enroll. Trade schools? Vocational programs? I guess those are the spots for the kids who just scrape by with Cs.

Honestly, I think they really messed up with this whole split between academic high schools and vocational ones. Even if the reality isn't actually that different, just the way it's labeled makes it feel like anything that isn't a traditional prep school is somehow second-rate.

Back when I was in school, you had all sorts of options—prep schools, nursing programs, business schools, trade schools for mechanics or construction... Sure, there were definitely some schools where you knew the kids weren't exactly looking to pull all-nighters studying, but everyone else was treated pretty much the same. The kids in the prep tracks weren't treated like royalty compared to the other solid vocational programs.

If anything, I remember that students from those general prep schools actually struggled more with college entrance exams because they hadn't picked up any specific, hands-on knowledge in a specialized field.

But now? It feels like you either go the prep route or you're basically a failure. I swear, I hear people pushing the prestige of those academic high schools everywhere you turn lately.

That kind of mindset is just something parents pass down to their kids, you know? Once it's in there, it’s basically set in stone, and there isn't much we can do to change it.
Even though I went to a prep school myself, honestly, it makes me pretty happy that none of those elite academies are even on my kid's radar right now.
If he decides later on that he really wants to push further after finishing his regular schooling, he can always jump into higher ed whenever he feels like it—it's not like he's forced into it.
In our house, there's zero pressure from the AFL-CIO types or anyone else to chase some specific degree; if he actually wants to go for it, we aren't going to be the ones standing in his way.
(And if he ends up having a total change of heart at the very last second... 🤣)

Since I spent my whole life being pushed into things I didn't want—first high school, then college, and now stuck in a career I’m just not passionate about—I’ve never once tried to tell a junior what to do. Honestly, she figured out her path way too early, fought tooth and nail for it, and actually got people to back her up.

On top of that, she’s a total perfectionist and a huge overachiever; for her, anything less than the absolute best prep school just wouldn't cut it. I have no clue where that attitude comes from. My husband and I aren't elitists at all—in fact, we've always had nothing but respect for tradespeople and local craftsmen. Her grandmother definitely pushed that "upper crust" mindset, but we shut that down pretty quickly.

It really bugs me when I hear her talking about how students at her fancy private academy look down on kids from the local public schools. It’s just wrong, though I guess it's hard to fight against how society works.

I ended up enrolling in a standard high school—nothing fancy or elite—mostly because I just didn't have a clue what else to do. My mother was actually pushing me toward vocational training instead.
Most people in my age group were heading straight into universities, aiming for places like Foxconn, the Department of the Treasury, MIT, or even the FBI... much like the kids from those top-tier prep schools.
There was only one girl in my class who didn't end up in college at all, mainly because she failed her entrance exams for Adobe twice.

Jason Ortiz5 said:Honestly, I think they really messed up with this whole split between academic high schools and vocational ones. Even if the reality isn't actually that different, just the way it's labeled makes it feel like anything that isn't a traditional prep school is somehow second-rate.

Back when I was in school, you had all sorts of options—prep schools, nursing programs, business schools, trade schools for mechanics or construction... Sure, there were definitely some schools where you knew the kids weren't exactly looking to pull all-nighters studying, but everyone else was treated pretty much the same. The kids in the prep tracks weren't treated like royalty compared to the other solid vocational programs.

If anything, I remember that students from those general prep schools actually struggled more with college entrance exams because they hadn't picked up any specific, hands-on knowledge in a specialized field.

But now? It feels like you either go the prep route or you're basically a failure. I swear, I hear people pushing the prestige of those academic high schools everywhere you turn lately.

That's simply not true, period.
Entrance exams for university almost never included specialized technical subjects.
And honestly, speaking as someone who attended a prep academy, we actually found it easier to get into engineering colleges than our peers from the technical schools did.
We had a much stronger grasp of math and physics, which was exactly what the admissions tests focused on.

wearybison8 said:That's simply not true, period.
Entrance exams for university almost never included specialized technical subjects.
And honestly, speaking as someone who attended a prep academy, we actually found it easier to get into engineering colleges than our peers from the technical schools did.
We had a much stronger grasp of math and physics, which was exactly what the admissions tests focused on.

Talking about "specialized subjects"? As someone who went through the general high school track, you might want to work on your reading comprehension. 🤷

Jason Ortiz5 said:Talking about "specialized subjects"? As someone who went through the general high school track, you might want to work on your reading comprehension. 🤷

It was actually tougher for those of us coming from liberal arts high schools because we didn't have the specific technical background required for certain university majors.

What would that look like?
Maybe give us a concrete example ☕
Pure nonsense.

It appears they might soon mandate national exams for all 8th graders... rumors are swirling 😉

Kate Jackson4 said:It appears they might soon mandate national exams for all 8th graders... rumors are swirling 😉

Where is this coming from? Is this just parent gossip or is there actually something happening at the Department of Education?

High school students always seemed to have the upper hand when it came to passing those entrance exams. Now, you could argue that vocational students had a bit of an edge during that first year—mostly because they weren't staring at a technical drafting pen like it was some alien artifact—but high schoolers generally walked in with a much more solid foundation. In the end, though, that head start didn't really move the needle much when it came to actually crushing it in college or making it in the real world.

High school is definitely the move if you want to crush your SATs and college entrance exams. It’s especially helpful if you're planning on a major that leans heavily on those advanced tracks—you know, the science-heavy stuff like chem and bio.
Take a school like San Francisco High, for instance; they've got actual labs and way more hours dedicated to those core subjects. Honestly, I don't see any real advantage to going the vocational route instead.
Or look at MIT—if you go there for math or CS, you're absolutely going to get demolished during freshman year if you aren't prepared.
It's a different story if you come from a language academy and try to jump into Stanford University or something similar. That's a much steeper climb.
The bottom line is you need to actually know what you want before you even sign up for high school. Too many kids just end up where their parents tell them to go, or they just follow their buddies into some random program and totally screw themselves over.