Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Kindergarten redshirting on 60 minutes tonight

I don't see where age or date-of-birth is requested on the Common App
https://www.commonapp.org/CommonApp/Docs/DownloadForms/2012/2012PacketFY_download.pdf , and since older students will not call attention to their age, I don't think 19-year-olds are penalized by admissions or scholarship committees. Younger students can choose to mention their age in their essays, but I don't know if they get any credit for this.

ETA: As someone pointed out, the Common App does ask for date of birth, near the top.

Actually sports more often exacerbates the problem by encouraging parents with "younger" kids to deliberately redshirt. We live in a community where the little league baseball (which is huge here) cutoff is May 1 with the school district cutoff on September 1. So my June birthday son couldn't play baseball with his grademates (no exceptions allowed regardless of athletic ability). Our soccer league is more enlightened and actually forces the older kids to play with their age mates, but lets the younger kids automatically play up (provided they are young for their grade). In our community more than 80% of August birthdays (and practically all of the boys), 70% of July birthdays, and 60% of June birthdays are redshirted. Even in May, the average is like 40%. Since redshirting is done much more often for boys than girls, one can only imagine the percentage of boys that are redshirted when the percentage of boys is broken out.

I actually think that there should be a high school league prohibition on 19 year old high school athletes. This would stop the redshirting problem in its tracks.


Birthdate is the third line down at the top left of the first page.

And replace it with, "I don't agree that my kid who can't read should be made to repeat a year, because then he won't be able to play sports senior year, and won't be recruited / get an athletic scholarship / make it big in the NBA."

There's no system that people won't game, if they perceive gaming the system to be to their benefit.

See "the practice of law" for further details.

Oops, my error. But none of the books on college admissions I have read say that admissions committees penalize redshirts and will prefer an 18yo to a 19yo, other things being equal.

In my previous life (before motherhood) my job was at a medical school and part of the work I did was with the admissions department. While age wasn't looked at too closely, I will admit that we did notice if a kid was anything other than the typical 21 or 22 year old.

If someone was in their 30s (rare) we knew they were probably trying for a new career and/or had a story. Having a few older/non traditional students in the mix - so long as they are highly qualified - can sometimes round out a good mix for a class.

If they applicants were younger than typical - say 20 or 19 - we knew they were probably extremely bright. Sometimes the young ones needed some extra hand holding while in school just due to maturity issues, but often they did not. Sometimes their parents were a bit overly involved - sometimes they were not.

If applicants were a bit older than expected... well, to be honest that was a bit of a red flag. Red flag - not meaning we immediately tossed their application aside, but red flag meaning we looked closer to see "what went wrong?" Were they not able to complete college in 4 years? Were they held back in grade school? Sometimes there were explanations in the essays, sometimes not. It did indeed make us pause and wonder what happened. Was there some problem that we couldn't see on the application or with the test scores?

Sorry to sound judgmental but when you have nearly 7,000 outstanding applicants for 125 spots in a class, you look for any reason to dismiss an applicant. When you are talking about an ultra competitive area like medical school, seeing a kid that was 24 or 25 before graduating from college is an unwritten (and sometimes unspoken) red flag.

Again, this was for medical school admissions. I'm sure undergraduate admissions would have their own take on things. They would have a better view, perhaps, of what happened earlier in their education to put them a year behind. They would at least have the high school transcripts - our applicants only provided undergrad and previous grad school transcripts. Also, admissions philosophy going to vary a lot school-by-school.

When all things are equal in terms of MCATS, GPA, volunteer experiences, interviews, and quality of undergraduate institutions, I know we would most likely take the 22 year old over a 24 year old. This isn't a written admissions rule - just a gut instinct on the level of administrators and committee members who vote on which students get an offer.

Being Canadian, I am not familiar with SAT.

Does age, even a year or two, make a difference on scoring? I you are 16 or 19, will it be affected by the curve?

Ren

The SAT is not normed for age.

Generally, the older you are, the better you do.

I did not catch the program so if this concern was previously addressed, I apologize. As a criminal defense attorney, I would strongly advise against holding a kid back. The age cut off of eighteen is used to differentiate whether criminal cases are filed in adult or juvenile court.
I recently saw a situation where a group of highschoolers vandalized some property. The group contained mostly 17 year olds but one older kid who was 18. The 17 year olds were charged in the juvenile system where there are several options to keep such things off the kid's record. The 18 year old was charged and convicted with a felony. The prosecutor argued that the increased penalty was justified because he was the leader of the group.
This doesn't even get into the problems that can occur with 19 year old male students sharing the halls with 14 year old female students in a 9-12 high school.
Of course no one is thinking about this stuff when their kid is five but it is something to consider.

SAT scores from 1999-2001 for 7th and 8th graders, and scores from 1997-1998 for older students, are at http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/SATScoresNontradTestTakers.pdf .

Here are the means, verbal followed math.

7th grade: 426, 447
8th grade: 493, 518

by age:
<20 477, 491
20 473, 477
21-24 486, 476
25-29 516, 474
30-39 525, 461
>=40 508, 437
all 483, 483

Verbal scores increase up to the age range 30-39 and then decrease. Math scores decline, especially after the 20-29 age range. People taking the SAT at age 30 differ from those taking at age 17 in more than age, so these numbers should be interpreted with caution.

For the Duke TIP 7th grade talent search of 2010-2011 http://www.tip.duke.edu/talent_searches/grade_7/7GTSResultsSummary.pdf , the average SAT scores were 430, 450, and 410 for Critical Reading, Math, and Writing. I have not been able to find comparable results for the Johns Hopkins talent search

The existence of math academies such as Russian School of Math
http://www.russianschool.com/results.html boosts the number of 7th and 8th graders with high SAT math scores -- their page boasts of many with 700+ scores.