Overachievers and the College Transition
Top Tier Students are Aided and Abetted by Parents and Teachers
Nov 24, 2008
Every high school has a top tier group of students. These are the school’s “best and brightest.” Most of the school’s student leadership positions are filled by these students and premier athletics and extra curricular venues overlap their many interests. Not only are they expected to get “As” in all of their courses, but teachers and parents see perfect scores as a foregone conclusion. Pushed forward by awards and accolades, many entering college find a different world with highly demanding expectations.
High Schools, Parents, and the Over-Achiever
A cartoon once featured a high school senior opening an envelope containing a response from a college. The student says to his parents, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get into the college of your choice.” Parents of upper tier students are more than stakeholders in the institution. They edit their children’s essays and papers, often to the point of writing them themselves. They compute every given grade, whether a homework score or a major test, to ensure that there will not be in drop in GPA. At the hint of the slightest discrepancy, they contact the school, usually bypassing the offending teacher and going right to the principal. Increasingly, this continues into the college years.
Commenting on “helicopter parents,” Scott Carlson [1] quotes University of Rochester anthropologist Nancy Foster, whose research demonstrated on-going student-parent communication over assignments. Referring to research papers, Ms. Foster stated that, “one can only assume that parents were editing their papers in high school. It would not have just started now.” As more parents “hover” on the university campus, professors must deal with grade justification because parents ultimately pay the tuition and help to build college endowments. The days of saying “I don’t talk to parents” may be limited as university administrators follow an appeasement process begun in the high schools.
High school teachers are also at fault. Top students are rapidly advanced and praised for every word they contribute in the classroom. Teachers too often see a name on an essay or paper and immediately assume that the work has to be first rate. How many teachers have looked over colleague’s rosters at the start of a semester and exclaimed, “you’re so lucky to teach Johnny! His brother was valedictorian and Johnny is following in that same path!” It is also true that top students often receive more attention than students at the bottom end of the grade book, further enhancing their status as academic giants.
Transitioning to College
For many such students, the college experience will reflect a rude awakening. They will have to prove themselves anew in an environment where few if any instructors see them as intellectual gods. Course work will be more demanding and, despite a resume of AP and honors high school courses, the work will be significantly harder. Bruce Hammond quotes a 2002 report [2] that argues, in part, that high school and AP courses, “feature broad surveys and superficial coverage…the senior year in high school is wasted for many students.” Such observations increasingly point to the level and depth of high school preparation.
Does high school grade inflation do more to harm students that may not receive an “A” in a college course simply because of who they are? Any undergraduate class that starts out with students that have strong histories of only “A” work will end with a broader spread of grades and some of those “A” students may actually end with “Bs,” “’s,” or worse. Parents, high school teachers, and administrators need to assess if "A-enabling" without the accompanying work and thought is truly beneficial in the long term.
The college preparation process should demand a greater sense of independent thinking from prospective high school graduates. Cutting the academic apron strings and allowing overachievers to learn from mistakes will ensure greater success at the university level. Teachers as well should be candidly realistic in reviewing assessment of top tier students.
[1] Scott Carlson, “An Anthropologist in the Library,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 17, 2007, Vol. 53, Issue 50, p. A26.
[2] Bruce G. Hammond, “Advancing Beyond AP Courses,” Chronicle of High Education, May 2, 2008, Vol. 54, Issue 34, p. B17
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