Her wake-up call is coming soon. She won't get anything. It is getting harder and harder to get the scholarships. Sorry about the AP class. He should have asked for help earlier. The good news is it doesn't really hurt him. Just a wake up call for him that those AP classes are not easy. BS15 had his first one this year and got a B for the first time in his life. Reality check for him. He is upset because it affected his GPA and blamed the teacher. Even sent an email asking for her to re-evaluate since he was only at 89.5 and she had the discretion to make it an A. She never responded. I just sat back and explained that not everything is going to come as easy as he thought. He needed to study....

I agree Teenagers are a pain. Good news is they leave home sooner rather than later.....

They come with their own set of challenges. My BS is brilliant and has had all the very gifted classes all his life. But, that brings other challenges such as being called a geek and him learning to embrace that. I had to get him books on famous ones for him to embrace it. Now his goal is to keep his 4.0 GPA. I worry about his striving to achieve becoming OCD. I have it and in some ways he shows signs of it. Common with kids like this. My son is a good kid and should be fine, but, I have stayed on him for years to get him this way.

Your son will be fine and it really is actually good for him to fail a class now before he gets to college. The counselor at school kept telling me that it was great that it came so easy for him. But, my DH is an engineer and thinks it may actually be a detriment. He says when he gets to his college classes in his major, it will be hard and if he thinks it is just going to happen as it did in HS, he will have a hard time and could end up back at home.

Just keep encouraging him that their is a reason it is an AP class it is to prepare him for college. Also, in college most of these classes have Study Groups and he should think about that option if he is not open to tutoring. DH says if it weren't for Study Groups, he wouldn't have gotten through his engineering classes. I keep hoping BS will do something like that for AP Statistics. But, he is a hard case and is sure he can get it on his own.

I have a bit of a different perspective on getting in to college. I refused to play the application/waitlisted ranking game. I applied to a bunch of colleges. With the application I sent my acceptance letters to several non competitive entry schools.

If the good schools wanted me, they could compete with all of the others that wanted me. With this strategy I got early acceptance to a couple of Ivy League schools and several academic scholarship and athletic scholarship offers to smaller highly recognized competitive entry schools. I had great grades in HS and a bunch of honors. I had a stellar ACT score and a decent SAT score. But, I was not a top prospect to meet the diversity model for many of the top schools.

Ultimately I decided that I was not interested in the game so I went to the school I wanted to attend in a place I wanted to be rather than the big name schools. I did start at Princeton though.

In the U.S. anyone with a HS diploma a GED or even a felony conviction who is in prison for life can go to college even at the best schools.

For most kids as long as the school is regionally accredited I recommend that kids NOT play the game of hanging on baited breath for acceptance letters from competitive entry schools. Rather than that game make the schools play the kids game and recruit the kid.

There are a ton of fully accredited non competitive entry schools who are much more focused on the success of the student than many or even most of the large and big name schools are.

The big schools don't give a crap if the kid succeeds or not. Once a kid drops out or graduates they are no longer a benefit to the school and there are countless other kids salivating to take the place of a drop out.

Smaller and non competitive entry schools need their graduates to grow value for their programs in the employment market and to attract more students.

If a kid can get in to a Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, MIT, UT, etc.... fine and congratulations. My experience at these or similar schools was not particularly good. Waiting for more than a year for a class I needed for graduation, nefarious input from academic advisors who told me to read the catalog and pick the courses I wanted, no interest in my class attendance, etc... I got A's in several classes that I never turned in an assignment for, went to class only on test days and one class I only went in for the final because the Prof would let you take the final and the three other tests all on finals day. I got an A and it was an upper division Soc class and I was a sophomore.

College is not about grades or even primarily about academics IMHO. It is about growing to be a performing member of society and a viable adult, learning to work and the effort and work it takes to be those things. Learning to learn is the important part of college.

I recommend that rather than look for the Name school, find one that requires attendance to pass a class, requires the kid to actually do some work, that has a very active grad placement office and will be interested in the kid's success because the school's future is closely associated with the kid's future.

Your SD can go to school. It is likely she will be one who pays a ton of money over years for classes that she will rarely pass and she will likely never graduate. My SIL is one of these kids. She is now 24 has $60K in school debt, lives on her school loans, fails at least one class per term, has been kicked out of he Ed. program and is about to get kicked out of the university entirely for crappy grades. If she does manage to graduate it will be with a nearly worthless degree that will not allow her to make enough money to ever pay back her loans. She has never learned how to learn though my wife and I tried to get here to that point.

Your BS will be fine. He seems like one of the fortunate kids that gets IT at a young age. He will successfully complete a degree that has an associated job market and will be fine.

All of this I see in my Rags crystal ball.

Rags crystal ball is correct. I have said pretty much the same thing to my son. You can get a good education at a good school and you do not have to pay a fortune. He used to talk Ivy League, but now understands that I will not help that much. Here in GA, as long as he has a B average and you attend a state school, your tuition is paid for. So now we are considering several schools in Atlanta. For medical school he can go where he wants. But his undergrad has to be here in GA. Why not save while you can to delay going into debt.

My DH hires people all the time and says he doesn't care where you went to school. It matters what the school taught you. He is an engineer and went to a state school and has hired from Bigger name schools and says they are unprepared for a real job in engineering.