Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
My DD's transcripts DO look like what Cricket describes (her GPA is a weighted 4.4, unweighted it's 3.96) and she has hard-core leadership experience in 4 different EC's, has 3 other EC's, and has hundreds of hours of community service to her credit. Her test scores are well over 90th percentile-- and one subscore at 99th. One shot, and no subject tests, no AP scores. She should graduate in the top 3 in her class.

This sounds like a lot-- and it is, in terms of scheduling everything-- but DD still has plenty of free time. This is because she simply doesn't have to work that hard to do most of it; it DOESN'T take her four hours to do her homework at night-- only 30 minutes.


We've not really pushed her to do all of those things she's got on her resume, but we definitely see some peers who DO get that kind of pressure. As I've noted before, these are parents who are pushing MG or bright NT kids to look as though they are PG. The genuine article doesn't require so much effort to look like that, YK?

See, I think that the difference on our end is a couple fold:

1) dd's school has the most bizarre weighting system that I've ever seen. I thought that dd misunderstood what they said until we reached this year when she was taking AP classes. For an A in an AP class, you get a 4.02 rather than a 4.0 figured in. They also take nine classes per semester. So, if your unweighted GPA was a 3.96 coming out of your junior year, I don't think that you could get the weighted number much over a 4.0 even if you'd taken every AP class available and gotten As in all of them when you are only getting an additional .02 points per AP classes and spreading that over the 54 classes you would have taken by that time. Also, to have gotten to AP science courses by your junior year, you would have had to have taken two science courses each year since pre-AP bio, Earth Systems, and pre-AP chem must all be completed before any AP science that is weighted. There is no AP lit class available until 11th grade either and pre-AP gives you no GPA bonus.

2) my dd is not blessed with speed. Her processing speed is very average or even a bit below. Her depth is amazing and she out performs her grade peers on achievement tests by a lot (still 99th percentile compared to national and her school's norms) but the other kiddos seem to be able to do good enough work to get As faster or they just aren't sleeping - lol!

If I am defining "effort" as time, she does require as much as the bright and MG kids easily. Where she differs is that the quality of the work she is putting out (like writing for instance) is beyond what those kids can do even with a lot more time than she.

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