Did he have a lesson with Amherst teachers? I would go with the teacher he likes. I don’t trust places with conservatories for non conservatory kids because I was told you don’t get access to “real” teachers there. I know in places with grad school, you get assigned grad students. Oberlin has no grad school though, but if you don’t have a spot in a studio for a conservatory kid, how do you find a place for a non conservatory one? I am musing aloud here. Congrats to your DS though. I know how much of a roller coaster this process is, especially for music kids.

What’s happening? We don’t input any data but it was all brought in from IRS without our handling a single number. I am looking at SAI now and it seems a bit lower to me than what we anticipated. How do I know if there is a mistake?

Oh it absolutely is! Like sports! Congrats!

I also think AoPS was the single best thing we did in our homeschool given my son’s choice of major.

How does one take IB exams if you do online school?

Mine has a somewhat unpleasant roommate situation but it’s livable. He is hoping to struck out next year.

September travel could be a real perk going forward! Although I will say last year we felt a bit desperate as everybody left for college early and mine was sitting bored and alone most of September.

Mine is in the midst of the finals for the winter quarter as well. He gets to come home for a week and sleep and then do it all over again and another finals in the middle of June. He has a love/hate relationship with the quarter system.

DE is hit and miss across the country. I know in Bay Area it’s much better, and they even offer honors courses, although as a DE student, it’s hard to get the classes not being on a priority list. we have salivated over advanced math and physics at OHS. Just look at their school profile for college placement thought. It’s pretty good! Unless of course success is defined by the top 5 or Ivy placement only.

Relative to whom though Farrar? I won’t talk about placement rates for PSA kids out of CA or expensive private schools locally. Maybe they don’t do as well as Harvard Westlake? Sure. Say even if they don’t place as well, they offer an awful lot of great courses, types that if you have an advance kid who needs that sort of offerings are hard to find. I am not arguing, I am just saying that OHS looks amazing based on certain needs. And might not look as amazing if you have other shiny alternatives.

The kid I regret not putting there had scores to be admitted (the other kid doesn’t). He really needed courses beyond standard high school and our local DE is terrible. Academically he would have thrived there and had access to all that he needed, especially advanced math and physics. We also didn’t care about having coursework count in college and were mostly interested in giving him strong foundation which was spotty with our local DE. Plus we have friends whose kids attended and they found surprisingly good social community for their children with clubs and meetups. I think that would have also been a positive. We have a poster here whose kid attends part time @SeaConquest. Maybe she could chime in. I think in short ask yourself what are your alternatives. None of the fancy private schools in our area provide anywhere near the level of academics OHS has.

Well mine got into university with plenty of AP scores and had to retake everything anyway because they won’t apply APs to General Ed requirements. 🤷‍♀️ I would have taken an education OHS provides any day. And the number of post AP classes they offer for kids who need them and can’t otherwise get them is huge. They will prep you for the most rigorous programs. And I will say that their placement into colleges is much better than a fancy boarding option that charges twice as much locally.

I am not Farrar, but any institution a caliber of Stanford Online High can ditch APs without their students suffering repercussions at admissions. Honestly their brand is so strong that nobody will question the quality of education there and the validity of grades. The latter is problematic in mediocre high schools. So how do you distinguish between two kids with all A’s across same classes? The kid with an A and a 1 on the exam versus a kid with an A and a 5 on the exam. That is the story at our high school, but at a place like OHS, you don’t worry about this at all. Kids they have are already preselected (their app process only selects for super academically strong kids) and then you have a known rigorous coursework. I am sure whatever they will do will be better than APs. My biggest regret is not doing OHS with my older kid when we had a chance.

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

Are math problems different than on paper SAT? My kid can do even the calculator section without one. I wonder if it’s the same, we should stay away from Desmos. I could see how DS would mess things up with technology.

Oh that’s not good.

Hmmmm. My kid says he doesn’t know what is Desmos.

Non stem skills he needs will be a function of general Ed requirements at the college he picks. At my DS’s school engineering kids only have 4 general Ed courses to do and the school is large enough that you can find easier classes to take to somehow get those done without having to put too much effort. Math/physics/chem/bio though live under the college of letters and sciences and have 10 general ed course requirements none of which can be satisfied by APs. My kid most definitely had to do presentations and he has a writing intensive seminar to do in order to satisfy Writing 2 requirement. So public speaking, research paper writing skills are important.

Why this would make a difference in increasing the number of female engineers continues to escape me. And why this would make no difference to men.

I don’t really understand why that makes any difference. It’s strange to me. If you want to be an engineer, you go on the pathway. We have done that in other areas. I don’t think engineering is that special. I have never heard of stigma about boys in biology. My boy hates biology because it has too many things to memorize. He loved learning about the content and said it changed the way he views world, but he would never pursue it because it requires too much effort. Physics he says just requires understanding. So in his case, he is just lazy. I have never heard of anybody expressing any weirdness about boys majoring in bio.

This makes sense. I don’t know why suggesting that there are gender differences in preference for certain careers has become so politically incorrect. I have boys. Both very good at math but only one of them cares about STEM. Neither is interested in engineering or medicine. We encourage their interests.

The question is why though? Why they pick humanities and bio? Answer always tends to be misogyny or discrimination at workplace or lack of part time work in other fields. But if kids are picking this early in high school, I don’t think those are answers. It’s not ability either.

@Arcadiafunny. Are you telling me it’s only a problem in this country? 😂 I read somewhere that more restrictive the society, less gender imbalance in engineering. I can’t remember if it was Saudi Arabia or another country equally misogynistic towards woman that had a stronger female presence in those fields than the freest ones like in Northern Europe.

Makes sense. What I find interesting though is medicine was so male dominated and also very condescending towards women. Basically women were only good for nursing and attitudes and work environment weren’t good for women. Yet we managed to completely hold our noises and not just break into the field but dominate. This success is not being replicated in engineering despite many efforts. I will say one of the reasons we eliminated Rose Hulman from consideration was their male/female ratio. I wanted my boy to have a fighting chance of finding a girlfriend.

And not just money. Prestige and respect factor in I think as well.