Honest advice for grade 12 students and parents: I’m done gatekeeping senior year’s unwritten rules
Last Wednesday, I stayed after school to finish grading mock midterms when a parent knocked on my classroom door, her 12th grader trailing behind, hood pulled up over his hair, one elbow poking through a hole in his sweatshirt. She set a crumpled Tim Hortons napkin and her half-melted iced cap on the edge of my desk, right on top of a faded 2019 grad trip sticker, leaned forward, and said, “Why didn’t anyone tell us? He thought he had until April to pull up his mark for his engineering application. Now midterms are next week, and offers go out in six weeks.” The kid mumbled from the back that all the TikTok seniors said first semester senior year was just for chilling after applications went in.
I didn’t know what to say at first, because I’ve been part of the problem. I’ve been teaching 12th grade for 14 years, and for most of that time, I’ve gone along with the gatekeeping. We don’t tell you the messy, inconvenient parts of senior year because we don’t want to stress kids out before the holiday break. We don’t want to deal with panicked emails from parents at 10 p.m. We stick to the script: work hard, meet the deadlines, pick your program, and everything will work out. But after that meeting, and after what happened to my niece two years ago, I’m done holding back.
Two years ago, my niece Lila was in 12th grade, wanted to get into nursing. Her guidance counselor told her her 11th grade marks were solid, she could take it easy first semester. We all went along with it, didn’t push her to study for midterms because we didn’t want to ruin her “best year ever.” She dropped 5% on her average, got waitlisted at every school she applied to, and spent all of April begging admissions offices for a second look while all her friends were booking grad trips. I sat with her at my kitchen table while she cried over her laptop, and that’s when I realized how much we hurt kids by keeping the real rules to ourselves.
The first thing I’m not gatekeeping anymore: For almost all undergraduate programs, early offers are based almost entirely on your first semester 12th grade marks. Your 11th grade marks get you a look, but your midterm 12 marks get you the offer. If you slack off September to December because you think you’ve already done the hard work, you can’t pull that mark up before offers go out. I used to soft-pedal this to avoid panic, but now I tell parents and kids straight up: pull up your target program’s last year’s admission average in September, check your current progress after the first round of progress reports, and if you’re more than 3% under, block off one extra hour a week for the courses that count toward that average. It doesn’t mean you can’t go to homecoming or the fall cottage weekend, it just means you don’t sleep through your scheduled study blocks that month.
Second: If your kid still doesn’t know what program they want by the application deadline, that’s not a failure. We act like if you don’t check a box by mid-January, your whole life is over. But most public universities let you switch into most programs after your first semester, as long as you passed your intro courses. A lot of people don’t know that gap years don’t hurt your application, either—most admissions teams prefer them now, because applicants are more focused. If you’re stuck, the concrete step is this: apply to the general arts or general science stream at the school you like, the one with the lowest admission requirement you qualify for. You don’t have to commit to it, you just have to have a spot to work from. You don’t have to pick a four-year degree in September of grade 12 to be successful. I’ve had kids who spent their first year in general studies, switched to education after two years, and are now teaching right down the hall from me.
Third: The average posted on the university website is the average of everyone who got in last year, not a hard cut-off. If you’re 2% under that average, you still should apply. We don’t tell kids that because we don’t want them to waste application fees, but a $100 fee is worth it if you get in. The concrete tip here: add a short, 2-sentence note to your application about a recent project or part-time job that relates to the program. I’ve had kids get in with marks 4% under the posted average because they wrote about working at a local vet clinic for a year when applying to animal science, and admissions teams noticed that. It’s not a hack, it’s just how the process actually works, that we don’t talk about.
Last week, after I finished talking to that mom and her son, I gave them a copy of the unedited list I keep on my desk, the one I started after Lila’s waitlist panic. Some of my colleagues have said I’m oversharing, that I’m making kids more stressed than they need to be. A parent last month told me I was ruining the senior year experience by talking about rejections and waitlists openly. I get that. I don’t want kids to lose their minds over midterms, either. I still remind them to go to the prom and the grad trip, that those memories matter even if their marks aren’t perfect.
But I’d rather they have all the information up front than have to scramble to fix a problem when there’s almost no time left. I still don’t have it all figured out. Some kids are more stressed by the truth, some are relieved. Last week, a quiet kid who never talks in class stayed after to tell me he’d been panicking for two months because he still didn’t know what he wanted to do, and he thought he was the only one. That was enough for me. Gatekeeping didn’t help anyone. It just kept kids in the dark, and made the messy parts of senior year even harder than they need to be.
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