Commentary-Raising Exceptional | Analysis
The Harvard Crimson published a piece this week by staff writers Sebastian Connolly and Summer Rose reporting student reaction to the faculty’s decision to cap A grades at 20% per course. Students warned the policy will fuel competition, narrow course selection, and disadvantage students from less-resourced backgrounds. Top Tier Admissions
I want to engage with these arguments seriously. Not because they are persuasive — they are not — but because they reveal something important about how students in high-achieving environments have learned to think about grades, standards, and their own education. And that learned thinking is itself part of the problem the cap is trying to solve.
Let me take each argument in turn.
Raising Exceptional | The Luthar Series — Comp/Comp
There is a conversation I have with parents several times a year that follows a remarkably consistent script.
A parent comes in concerned about their child’s anxiety. We talk for a while about what the anxiety looks like — the checking, the sleeplessness, the comparison with peers, the way their child tracks every classmate’s grade and competition result with a precision and intensity that would be impressive if it weren’t so clearly making them miserable.
At some point I say: the comparison spiral is one of the most damaging things happening to your child right now. And the parent says, almost invariably: but isn’t that just competition? Isn’t that what it takes to succeed in this environment?
The answer is no. And understanding why — specifically, mechanistically, at the level of what comparison actually does to a developing adolescent — is one of the most important things a parent of a high-achieving student can do.
Raising Excellence | The Luthar Series — Harvard Kid
Suniya Luthar died on February 16, 2023. She was sixty-four years old.
She had spent thirty years doing something that sounds simple and turned out to be almost impossibly difficult: telling parents the truth about what elite academic environments were doing to their children. Not as an opinion. As data. Rigorous, replicated, longitudinal data that tracked students from high-achieving schools across years and decades and documented, with the precision of a scientist who understood exactly what she was looking at, the specific damage that achievement culture produces in the specific children it appears most to reward.
She published her findings in peer-reviewed journals. She testified before education committees. She built an organization specifically to translate her research into something families could actually use.
And the parents who most needed to hear what she was saying largely did not hear it. They were too busy getting their children into college.
This series is an attempt to fix that.
Motivation-Story-Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series
There is a word that comes up in almost every conversation I have with the parents of struggling students, and it is almost always wrong.
Lazy.
He’s lazy. She used to care so much and now she’s just lazy. I don’t understand what happened — he was so motivated in middle school and now I can’t get him to open a textbook. It’s like someone turned a switch off.
This is not laziness. Lazy is a description of behavior. What I am describing is a state — a specific psychological condition with specific causes and specific mechanisms and, critically, specific interventions. Treating it as laziness — which is what most parents do, and most schools, and most of the students themselves — is not just ineffective. It is the one response most reliably guaranteed to make things worse.
I want to tell you about two students.
Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series — The Parent Essay
Let me start with something I want you to hold onto through everything that follows.
The parents I have worked with over twenty years — the ones whose children struggled most with anxiety, whose households had the highest emotional temperature around academic performance, whose kids were most trapped in the patterns described in the Anxiety Primer — were almost universally loving, attentive, and deeply invested in their children’s wellbeing. They were not neglectful. They were not cruel. They were not indifferent. They were, in most cases, doing more for their children than any previous generation of parents had done.
And some of what they were doing was making things significantly worse.
This is the hardest thing I tell parents. Not because it is harsh — it isn’t, when understood correctly — but because it asks something genuinely difficult: to look honestly at behaviors that feel like love and ask whether they are actually helping.
Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series — The Anxiety Primer, Part II
Part II covers the patterns that are most visible from the outside and most often misdiagnosed. They look like character issues — jealousy, social anxiety, stubbornness about college lists. They are not. They are specific, well-documented psychological patterns with specific mechanisms and specific interventions.
Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series — The Anxiety Primer, Part I
Every high-achieving student carries something. Most parents can see it — the tension before a test, the sleeplessness, the inability to relax even when nothing is due. What most parents cannot see is the specific pattern underneath it. This primer is about those patterns — six of the most common ways that anxiety manifests in high-performing students, drawn from twenty years of direct practice and the clinical research behind it.
Gina Story-Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series
The first thing her mother mentioned was sleep.
Not the C in Calculus BC. Not the three club presidencies she was fighting to hold simultaneously. Not the teacher who had told her she couldn’t run student council and DECA at the same time, a ruling Gina was contesting with the focused intensity she brought to everything. Not Annie. Her mother mentioned all of these things eventually. But she began with sleep.
Gina wasn’t sleeping. Not catastrophically — not in the way that sends parents to doctors and produces diagnoses. It was subtler than that, and in my experience considerably more damaging. She was staying up past midnight most nights, finishing homework or telling herself she was finishing homework, then spending an hour on her phone because her mind wouldn’t decelerate. She would fall asleep at one. Wake up at six-thirty. Push through the school day on caffeine and willpower.
Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series — The Macro Essay
Something has gone wrong with a generation of young people, and we have spent the better part of a decade arguing about who is responsible for fixing it.
The argument has produced very little fixing.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory calling youth mental health a crisis of historic proportions. The same year, the UK government commissioned its fourteenth report on children’s wellbeing in as many years. South Korea declared a national emergency around adolescent depression and suicide. Australia launched a new digital safety framework. The European Union proposed regulations on algorithmic content targeting minors.
Raising Exceptional | The High-Achiever Psychology Series — The Primer
You have already met Tim.
The 7th grader whose mother called him lazy. Who qualified for USAMO and got into MIT. Whose mother sat across from me in my office, convinced the problem was discipline, while her son sat beside her — a prodigy who was quietly falling apart.
Tim’s story is one. But the mechanism inside it repeats itself, in different forms, across hundreds of students I have worked with over twenty years. The names change. The subjects change. The stakes change. The fear underneath does not.
This essay is about that fear.