My dds are enrolled with EPGY (open enrollment) and we are happy with what we get for the price we pay.

I'm very interested in the CTY through Johns Hopkins and was wondering if anyone has had experience with both EPGY (regular program) and CTY who could give me a comparison?

Or. . . if you have enrolled your kids through CTY in the elementary grades I'd love to hear your thoughts on that too.

Thanks

My DS12 has taken a number of CTY classes and one EPGY regular program class. These are high school classes, but I expect that things are comparable in a lot of ways.

Overall, I think that CTY is a lot more organized than EPGY. CTY makes requirements and registration procedures crystal clear.

Dealing with EPGY can be frustrating. For example, unless they've changed things substantially since last semester, figuring out how you qualify and how to register can be frustrating. Don't even get me started on frustrations with the online high school. "We will make a decision shortly." "When is shortly?" "Shortly is soon." (Turned out to be two months, and we got a letter dated two months before DS had applied, and so had to contact the Dean to see if, in fact, they had sent the correct letter to the correct kid).

The classroom experience for EPGY was very good. They use a system allowing kids to see a teacher and classmates in real time. I don't know if all their classes use this system.

CTY classes can be session-based or independent. DS has done both. The session-based classes upload a new lesson every week and assignments are usually due a week later. So you don't see classmates. Overall, the session-based teachers have been incredible: the lessons are great, there's lots of contact with them, etc. I really can't gush enough praise for them.

The quality of the independent study courses varies. IMO, quality is lower courses I call "canned," which means Some company somewhere developed this course and we in-licensed it and hired someone to teach it. IMO, these courses are NOT worth the steep price tag you pay for them. Maybe some are better than the two DS tried and dropped like hot potatoes. I don't know.

Alternatively, so far, the quality is higher in the home-grown independent study courses. This means that the course was developed specifically for CTY. The teachers tend to be enthusiastic and knowledgeable.

Soapbox alert:

I fear that home-grown courses will become scarcer because they require more work and probably (I'm speculating here) aren't as profitable as something that OnlineCourses_R_Us developed by committee and licenses out. IMO, the problem with these types of courses is that they aren't developed for gifted kids.

My understanding from a conversation with someone at CTY is that they're considering in-licensing a slew of humanities courses made by a company that targets at-risk low achievers. I have no idea if they'll pick up these classes or not, but I personally don't like the idea. At-risk low achievers can have very different learning needs than gifted kids have. I'm also not convinced that I like paying several hundred to 1K+ dollars for something that was developed by committee and is available elsewhere for a fraction of the price.

I understand that online ed. is getting to be huge and that Hopkins sees itself competing with companies like K-12 and the like. But CTY was always about the special needs of gifted students, and I fear that too many canned courses designed for the needs of the majority will dilute their brand and damage one of the few really good options for very smart kids. /soapbox rant

Thanks so much for this information Val. I appreciate the rant too.

What else is out there that is comparable to these that cater to gifted kids? Anything else worth looking into? I'd like to make a decision pretty soon for next year.

How old are you daughters?

They are 9 and 7.

AOPS (it has been discussed on this forum a few times).

IMO, both EPGY OE math and AOPS are excellent, *IN DIFFERENT WAYS* (I do not have first-hand experience with CTY). EPGY OE math is 'standard' math (one is taught standard steps for standard problems), while AOPS is all about problem solving skills, where one is supposed to figure out steps (or various best sequence(s) of steps).

Example AOPS (prealgebra, chapter 1, arithmetic): something like: calculate 95+96+97+98+99. There are a few solutions, besides straight addition, among them:
1) 95=100-5, ... (and then add -5+(-4)...)
2) apply formula for arithmetic progression - directly or (better) extracting 100s first.

In addition to textbooks (about $35), AOPS has Alcumus (online problem and solution engine, free) and (lively) online session-based courses (about $250 for 16 weekly sessions). Course cancellation period is 2 or 3 weeks, which is very useful for deciding if a particular course would work for you.

For math before Prealgebra, AOPS has (newer) Beast Academy, with which I am not familiar, but which has been disussed on this forum too.

BTW, AOPS is the home of a famous (very short) article "Calculus Trap" about (in my words and I apologise if I get it wrong) 'new content' consumption (which maybe too easy (= bad) for gifted children) vs. hard problem solving.

I use CTY for math. It is organized, suits my needs.

Though I found that they do geometry online for the course. They use a button and get a perpendicular line, but on the exam, they need to use a compass and protractor. You have to help them learn these things.

That would be the same for both since Epgy is CTY basic. CTY does have many other courses I am interested in down the road and their camps.

Some research from EPGY says that their curriculum is effective for a substantial fraction of low-income students.

http://epgy.stanford.edu/research/Final%203%20Effectiveness%20Study%20Report%207.18.09.pdf
Patrick Suppes, Paul W. Holland, Yuanan Hu, and Minh-thien Vu (2009) Effectiveness of Stanford’s EPGY Online Math K-5 Course in Eight Title I Elementary Schools in Three California School Districts, 2006-2007

Abstract
Stanford University’s Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) conducted a randomized
treatment experiment during the 2006-2007 school year to test the efficacy, for Title I students, of
the EGPY Kindergarten through Grade 5 Mathematics Course Sequence (Math K-5). While the
EPGY curriculum was originally developed for gifted students in any grade, the students in this
study were not selected as gifted but were simply the students in the Title I schools. If we restrict
attention to those EPGY students who were in the top half of the distribution of correct first
attempts on the EPGY exercises (a measure of work and engagement in the EPGY curriculum)
we see substantial and statistically significant improvements in the CST07 test scores over the
scores of matched control students. The effects in second grade appear to be larger than those in
grades 3 to 5.

Key words: Randomized treatment experiment, matching, EPGY, Correct first attempts, HLM,
Proficiency Levels, CST, predicting future test results, Bayesian Classifiers, Mahalanobis
distance, Learning curves.

Thanks for the thoughts and info everyone. I'm leaning more toward CTY at this point I think. . .

It's interesting that they say the effects in second grade appear to be larger. My MG dd took the second grade EPGY math course as a replacement for her second grade school math and it was excellent. Interesting, appropriately challenging, well-organized. As an example, by the end of the course, she could solve word problems that can be modeled by a system of 2 equations and 2 unknowns.

However, a classmate later tried the EPGY 5th grade math and his mom said it was not good.

She is Gr. 6 now. If the EPGY courses haven't changed, I would recommend their 2nd grade math course.

My dd in Gr 6 is taking CTY's Flexi-Paced "The Process of Writing". It is advertised as being equivalent to a Gr. 11 course.

I'm not sure that I would agree with that, but it is certainly a well-designed and exciting course. The advanced part of it seems to be that students must be able to read several pages of instructions from different sources and put it all together in order to understand the lessons.

The instructor is wonderful in providing lots of detailed advice and comments. Her suggestions are positive and very specific and sandwiched between lots of authentic, detailed praise.

I would highly recommend it for Gr. 6-8 students who either enjoy writing or who would like to enjoy writing!

Interesting study. Honestly, sometimes I think that the way school is now, the material is so dried of and dumbed down that is probably a poor fit for most kids, just more so for gifted kids.