Originally Posted by jack'smom
Those are great scores! Congratulations!
I don't know what state you are in but one post said you are in the Pacific NW. For 2012, the Oregon cut-off was 216 and for Washington was 220. I know your daughter is grade accelerated but it begs the question- if she waited 1-2 more years, maybe she could hit the score to be a national merit finalist (which is obviously not the end all and be all). Would it be worth waiting for?

Well; a) too late now, KWIM? Once you get into official high school placements and they have a graduation cohort year assigned, any funny business looks baaaaaaaaad, baaaaaad, bad. So even if that WERE the case, the instant that the school reported her as a 10th grader last fall, this was a done deal, and
b) pretty sure that it wouldn't have mattered-- her problems simply aren't related to ability. She could have gotten a perfect score. If she'd not made errors related to misinterpreting/misreading questions and just dumb arithmetic errors, which she's incredibly prone to when she does mental math (which she INSISTS upon doing anyway, being both 13 and possessed of Cool Hand Luke syndrome, as noted elsewhere...).

So no, I don't think that she'd have been any better off taking it a year from now. Different day/different test, she'd have had a 225 score even this year, as we saw with practice exams. Her problem isn't ability to do the material at that level. Her problem is the same as it is with schoolwork; a) over-thinking, b) sloppy mental math, and c) speedy Gonzales syndrome (where she just flat out misses things because she's skimming the questions/answers rather than really reading them).

The easier the material, the worse all of those problems become. There's also an element of luck to things when the material is all skills that you've mastered, since misinterpreting the intent of any one question becomes so problematic. That is a known problem with scores on the ACT/SAT/PSAT above the 98th percentile.

Anyway-- explaining that because that was where MY head went, too. I actually apologized to DD in case SHE felt that being grade accelerated might have been the reason for not doing as well as she'd hoped. blush She reassured me that this is not the case, and explained much of the above to ME. I'm actually kind of proud of her for not taking that opening from me... since I realized after I opened my big mouth that it was a glorious opening for her perfectionism.

Even if it were true that an additional year might have added 10 points to her selection index score... I am quite confident that it would NEVER have been worth the angst of whipping her through below-level work for an additional year. wink

I will say that the guidance counselor was a bit taken aback that we weren't OVER THE MOON with 99th percentile results. LOL. She was speechless when I explained that DD had "hoped to do about 5-10 points better than that." grin



Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.