If they are really "pushing" this program, I would be automatically skeptical. While I'm not familiar with demonstrating high achievement in classics or related fields, I'm automatically skeptical of any program where you pay to play. In general for any program, whether it's math or engineering or humanities, to me the most prestigious and worthwhile programs are going to be the ones where the student is paid to attend. Or at the very least it's free. Many of these programs are probably hanging by a thread financially now and they may be trying to convince a few clueless rich people to sign up. I may be conspiracy-minded, but it wouldn't surprise me if the staff in your dd's department doesn't receive some sort of referral commission if your dd signs up.

So Duke is charging $40K on top of tuition? I know at Stanford, if you want to study overseas, you pay the same tuition as if you had stayed on campus. Attending Stanford is expensive of course, but at least you don't pay a premium to go overseas.

Dd was AoPS all the way until calculus, when she switched to PAH AP calc BC. We did that because she wanted an easy 5 with minimal work. She did complain because the teaching is not up to AoPS quality, but she was busy that year, so it was good decision for her. If you do AoPS, you'll probably want to look at the College Board Question Bank and have your student familiarize himself with the somewhat idiosyncratic questions on the AP exam. You don't want to be parsing those questions for the first time during the exam itself! Also, I don't think AoPS will give your student much calculator training, so there's that as well. Doing APs gave us the highest ROI: accountability with minimal work.

I used the US edition of Singapore Math, so maybe I had a different experience, but did you ever see an explanation for subtraction, using a table that looks like this? This one shows addition, but I couldn't find the subtraction version on the internet, and it's just the reverse process. I had actual little pieces of paper, labeled "1" "10" "100" etc. I took a "10" and replaced it with ten "1"s. I always asked my dd's if this was a fair trade, so they could see that the number has not actually changed. This is key. Now you can remove the number of "1" disks, even though we had zero of them to start. I had the usual algorithm going side by side with the numbered disks so my kids could always see what was happening "under the hood." If you truly believe "math is important" then you probably should not resort to having your student memorizing algorithms without understanding what is going on.

I wish your student and his cousin were competing on their performance in MathCounts and AMC 8 rather than racing through PreA and Algebra. Can you remind me what math curriculum your student is studying? I would rather see your student use AoPS Algebra when he has completed prealgebra to your satisfaction, along with practice and success in math contests. I personally would feel greater pride if my student made Distinguished Honor Roll than if he raced through Algebra in 6 months.

I don't think AoPS text covers loci specifically, but I do remember them in high school math. I recall a student asserted without proof that the locus of points equidistant from 2 skew lines is a hyperbolic paraboloid. Seems reasonable. And I remember we had a school evaluator visit our class on the same day when a student found an error in a locus problem in our textbook. The teacher had been using it for years and it was the first time someone noticed. I wish I could remember the problem.

This. What other math curriculum allows us to deploy our well-honed pirate voices?

Have you got to the part where the Native Americans are evicted from their lands? Ma has some choice words to describe them! Still I didn't mind so much because I think it's apparent this reflects the attitudes of people from a long time ago. I appreciate the honesty, and it's remarkably how attitudes have changed. Does anyone remember how in the Beverly Cleary books, Ribsy is fed horse meat? HORSE MEAT people! How weird is that, and it wasn't that long ago. OTOH, I think attempts to update or sanitize books is a disservice. I remember reading some Fudge book to the kids and we were cruising along with a vaguely 1970s vibe, when at a birthday party some character receives a Walkman for a present. And I'm think Walkman? And I'm looking it up in Wikipedia, and sure enough Walkmans weren't released until 1983, and so what kind of seer is Judy Blume? Turns out, some well-intentioned people decided they needed to update her books for a new generation of readers. And of course, ironically, but the time we got to reading it, not only was it anachronistic, but also out of date once again! (My kids didn't even know what Walkmans were.)

I want to add as well that the AoPS textbooks include constructions not in its own chapter but as a short section at the end of several (but not all) of the relevant geometry chapters. I think doing all the constructions at one time is a bit much.

Did anyone else see this and picture a kitchen island full of tarts and cupcakes? (I'm hungry...) I personally think constructions are fun, but skippable. Your student may enjoy the Euclidea app for android or apple phones for a gamified version of constructions.

Yes, I taught AoPS PreA just using the textbooks. I did a lot of contest math when I was a student, so it was familiar to me. The solutions are complete with every step explained, but if you aren't accustomed to more challenging problems you may need to prepare the problem sets yourself in advance to refamiliarize yourself with the topics and grow your problem solving skills.

Thank you for posting this because it gets cited so much and I think it's worth a closer look. Here are some of my thoughts/questions: 1. Table 1, p. 201. 37% male students. I mean I was aware more women were enrolling in college, but I had no idea it was that low. 2. I agree that correlating GPA and ACT score with 6 year graduation rate is a pretty low bar. 93% of U Chicago undergrads graduate in 6 years, and I suspect it's similar at other top colleges (92% at UC Berkeley, e.g.). So I'm guessing if a college is having difficulty graduating its students, they may want to shift their admissions to favor students with higher GPAs rather than higher ACT scores. But I'm not sure we can conclude that colleges with low admit rates should rely on GPA over ACT. I'm willing to see that having a high GPA shows longer term commitment toward a goal like graduating from college rather than a one time test score.

Fresh Start detergent.

I just remembered where the SAT subject test came in handy for us, quite unexpectedly. After middle school, dd enrolled in a regular high school. She wanted to take their AP bio class, but were refusing to allow her in. Finally we submitted a high SAT bio test score from middle school and they let her in. My advice to homeschooling families had always been to take the SAT subject test in the May or June after the corresponding high school class, just in case. Take 1 year of high school biology and then take the SAT bio test. Take 1 year of precalculus and then take the Level 2 SAT math test. If the student was paying attention in class, it should be an easy 700++, and a quick way to validate a grade. It's too bad that isn't available anymore. CLEP unfortunately suffers from a poor reputation among high achieving students. I'm not familiar with the exams, but this may be a good opportunity for whoever runs CLEP to fill the gap. Wait, College Board runs CLEP too! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! 😡

To the growing list of easy AP classes, I'll add AP CS A. I had both my dd's take AP CS and AP stats. My younger dd started AP statistics in March and my older daughter started AP CS in January and both made 5's on both exams. AP CS A was dumbed down in 2009. I don't think the loss of SAT subject tests will affect high achieving, wealthier students who can show achievement with other contests, research, or other activities. It will affect students applying to less competitive schools with admissions departments that need to distinguish students who have earned their high school diploma from those who have not.

I strenuously disagree that any AP course is college level. I think those classes are honors level high school at best, and more likely just what a regular high school level class ought to be, but rarely is. I'm melancholy about the end of SAT subject tests, mainly because I took them back when they were called SAT II's. If you paid attention in class, and got an A, you usually didn't need much (or any) additional study to clear 700-800, and showed colleges that at least your learned something, albeit not very much. While I'm no fan of the College Board, their AP courses provide students in the United States some much-needed standardization in high school curricula. A 5 on AP Calculus BC means something, while an "A" in some generic high school calculus class means very little. And while I'm no free market proponent, in this case I find that a private company has stepped in where government has failed to do so. Or where government tried to set some standards with Common Core and was punished for doing so. ETA: And precisely because CB is a private company and not the government, they are under no obligation to provide equal access to their AP exams, which we know hurts us homeschoolers.

I used the verbiage provided by the course instructor or in the textbook description and then lightly edit for consistency. I used passive voice and most of them read something like this: AP Statistics In this course, students are introduced to the major concepts and tools for collecting, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from data. Students are exposed to four broad conceptual themes: exploring data (describing patterns and departures from patterns), sampling and experimentation (planning and conducting a study), anticipating patterns (exploring random phenomena using probability and simulation), and statistical inference (estimating population parameters and testing hypotheses). Partner: PA Homeschoolers Instructor: Carole Matheny Text: The Practice of Statistics by Daren S. Starnes, et al. The actual course description can be found here. Sometimes the course descriptions are too sales-y and designed to entice students to take the class. I slim it down to just the content of the course.

I would definitely have your students take at least one old exam published by the College Board, so they can get a feel for time pressure (or lack of it).

I also don't care for the standard long division algorithm and I was tutoring a bright student who also could not memorize the steps to save her life. She did better with partial quotients which is explained in BA and elsewhere online. If you ever decide to try again, you might consider partial quotients, if only so you can tell the story of the pirates dividing up the pile of gold coins.

We did not submit any work samples, but we kept my student's lab notebooks just in case. I don't think we will need them because she will want to take lab classes at college anyway.

This is excellent practice and one many of us should adopt. Speaking everything out loud using correct terms and writing out each step costs us very little. And yet, we are so quick to skip steps and assume the student is following our logic. Even in my high school geometry class, the teacher rewrote all our subtractions as additions, I suspect in order to remediate our poorly taught junior high algebra. He always said out loud "We subtract 10 from both sides." It costs us very little in time and effort and go through each step, even when we are doing more advanced material.

I think @katilac has a good lesson here for a variety of circumstances. If you really want to apply to some school, but you can't cross all the t's and dot all the i's they ask for, then apply anyway. Even if you call and ask and they tell you the requirements are firm apply anyway. Often they will make exceptions for an exceptional candidate (or an ordinary candidate) but neither you nor they will know if you are exceptional until you apply.

I believe the Chapter and Chapter Invitation levels will not be proctored. Proctoring will begin at the State level. (Chapter Invitational is only during the pandemic season and will not continue in the future.) I'm pretty sure there will be no Team Round or Countdown Round until Nationals.

Here's a link to the free PDF.

Hey, thanks for this suggestion! I spent the last couple of days working through some old men's t shirts! I started with my neon orange Math Kangaroo shirt, which ended up too tight. But I tried again with some other shirts and I'm getting the hang of it! I had an XL t shirt that I slimmed down nicely too.