Education Archives - Page 5 of 7

Success Factors 8: Test and Retest and High Stress, the best way?

28 May, 2014 by ES Ivy

As I’ve outlined in my previous posts, I was pondering how to guide our kids to the best path of success, starting in high school by analyzing what the success factors are. We’ve tried both a partial load of preAP/AP classes and a full load of preAP/AP classes. Our personal experience has been that both ways have their own drawbacks.

Then I came across, The Smartest Kids in the World: and how they got that way, by Amanda Ripley.

Of course, everyone would like to think that their kid is the smartest kid in the world,:) even if they don’t want to admit it. But that’s not really what this book is about. It’s an unfortunate title, because it might make most parents think that the book has nothing to offer for their “average smart” kids let alone their “average” kids, but it does….

Success factors 7: High school advice, does high school stress lead to success?

21 May, 2014 by ES Ivy

For lots of reasons that I went over in some of my previous posts, we started questioning if our kid should be taking a full load of AP classes starting with this first post. We were wondering if a success factor in high school was taking a full AP load. So I continued asking more questions about AP classes and class rank at our school. Here are some of the things I learned.

Like a lot of schools, our students have essentially two GPAs.

The first is a straight GPA. Just an average of all your grades in all your classes.

Then they have another adjusted GPA that is used for their class rank, and they get extra points for preAP and AP classes. This means that even if you make a lower grade in a preAP or AP class, the grade used to compute you average is likely to be higher than you could possibly get in a ‘regular’ class. This makes sense, since it seems to avoid penalizing kids for taking harder classes. We’ll call their adjusted GPA, using this extra bump for harder classes, their class rank average.…

Success factors 6: Is there a connection between AP courses, reading, and SAT scores?

14 May, 2014 by ES Ivy

AP classes and SAT scores can both be thought of as measurements of success factors for high school. But does one have an affect on the other?

As I mentioned my last post, we noticed a couple of things about our school district that indicated that our school was not preparing students as well as it could to take the SAT and the PSAT. So I started trying to figure out why. Not that I think the SAT is a perfect measure for learning, but it seemed like the level of achievement should at least stay the same….

Success factors 5: Should you take the high school advice to take all the AP courses you possible can?

7 May, 2014 by ES Ivy

So after deciding that we thought the full advanced placement courses class load was a treadmill to no-where that was increasing in speed, we started out with recommending our kids take partial AP loads. But, we found that our kids weren’t getting as much out of their classes. Maybe the path the school was recommending for top students – a full AP load – was the right one after all.

The problem is that the standard advice – given by all high schools – is to take as many preAP/AP courses as you possibly can. This means that most of the serious students are in the preAP/AP classes….