Plano Highschools (Allen, Frisco, Jasper: transfer, community college, live in)

[unexpected]

how old is your kid right now? These things ebb and flow over time. I suspect by the time my kid (zoned to Plano West) hits high school, it will be less competitive.

High home prices have prevented many of the immigrant families from moving to Plano. Demographically, I expect Frisco and Plano to flip-flop within the next 10 years.

I would pick the feeder path that best suits your needs, minimizes your travel time, and maximizes the time you spend with your kids each day. At the end of the day, you are going to be your kid's most important teacher.

[CaptainAlex365]

What would be a competitive course load in this feeder? Do any students go above MVC?

[CaptainAlex365]

Here's a good planning resource, pretty enlightening...

https://youtu.be/dKK2SuMYhjI

[UnfairPark]

Originally Posted by CaptainAlex365

What would be a competitive course load in this feeder? Do any students go above MVC?

It’s not a norm to go beyond MVC and DD as AP CS and AP statistics count as math classes as well so usually no time in schedule to add more math.

[UnfairPark]

A rigorous and competitive course load to impress good colleges (for PWSH or any competitive public school) would have 10+ AP courses, preferably with a good balance of science, math, history and two languages (English & foreign) with a multi year athletic or fine art elective tied with a dedicated extracurricular.

[UnfairPark]

For aiming admission at state schools, keeping GPA high enough to rank in top 5-10% is good enough for automatic and even lower are likely to get in via non automated general admission. If not eligible for financial aid and hoping to get a good merit scholarship, focus on acing PSAT.

[CaptainAlex365]

Would it be a good idea to eliminate most honors and reg. required courses (health) through cbes and eschool? I've heard that maxing AP classes can prove beneficial for GPA.

[UnfairPark]

Originally Posted by CaptainAlex365

Would it be a good idea to eliminate most honors and reg. required courses (health) through cbes and eschool? I've heard that maxing AP classes can prove beneficial for GPA.

Your information is correct but be warned, just because a smart student can ace CBE, doesn't mean he mastered that course, he may struggle in advance class and keeping good unweighted GPA is important as well. As far as eSchool goes, its tedious but as those are required basic courses, it can be time efficient to make space in schedule for more interesting or higher weighted electives.

[unexpected]

Originally Posted by CaptainAlex365

Would it be a good idea to eliminate most honors and reg. required courses (health) through cbes and eschool? I've heard that maxing AP classes can prove beneficial for GPA.

What exactly is your goal here? Are you trying to have a kid in the top 1%?

Everyone in the top 5% is maxing out AP classes. There's no "I suck at english, so I'm going to take regulars/honors english instead" - the top kids are taking all of them.

The only "required" courses that there was no AP equivalent were health and P.E. (This was "back in my day" - about 15 years ago, so there may be new courses available). I did health by correspondence in a weekend. I took AP Art History instead of Art.

There was no way out of P.E. - but everyone is taking that.

All of these GPA games are relevant really only at the upper end of the scale, and will not affect your kid until they are in 11th or 12th grade.

I would strongly suggest you stop worrying about all of this and just empower your kid to do the best he or she can. I would definitely NOT encourage your kid to sign up for some random sports team that they're not familiar with in order to boost their college application chances.

[EDS_]

Originally Posted by UnfairPark

For aiming admission at state schools, keeping GPA high enough to rank in top 5-10% is good enough for automatic and even lower are likely to get in via non automated general admission. If not eligible for financial aid and hoping to get a good merit scholarship, focus on acing PSAT.

OP while the information here is generally correct for automatic admissions at UT-Austin this year's cutoff is top-6%, A&M is 25% both have minimum SAT or ACT requirements as well.

The point to remember is at these schools and other state schools an auto-admit gets a kid into the school not into their choice of programs. In other words finishing HS at the 75th percentile and decent test scores guarantees a kid a spot in A&M it almost certainly won't get him/her into engineering, oceanography, business, geology, any of the pre-medical tracks and on and on.