Originally Posted by Val
Originally Posted by jack'smom
The problem is that by high school, expectations for academic success are even higher. Colleges would want to also see that your child is a National Merit Semi-Finalist on the PSAT, an AP scholar (taking lots of AP classes), going to Nationals in Math or Science Bowl or the Intel Science Fair Competition.

Wow. This seems quite depressing to me. Like our kids have to be workaholics when they're eleven just to get into college.

It sounds a bit doom & gloom to me too, so I did a quick search on our school district's website for the number of National Merit Semi-Finalists. We had 22 semi-finalists in the fall of 2011 - I didn't google further to find out how many of those became finalists, but I know one of them that did. I also don't have time to search for the total # of high school seniors in our district, but fwiw we have 5 large high schools.

I can absolutely reassure everyone here that we had many many *many* more than 22 students get into really great colleges and universities last year, as well as many many *many* great scholarships.

polarbear