teen's grades will go down but not up, aspirations won't change

[ritaxis]

so this teen used to be one of my more successful ones.  Nowadays he can't get his grades above a C+ by any honest means.  I send him off to school with his homework all done and his motives maxed day after day and his grade stays the same.  I've been switching between aging off and aging on to give him more time to get a decent grade before he gaduates.  There are three other teens in the house and they're all a+ students if they do their homework, and one stays A+ even if he misses a couple of days (that's probably also a glitch, but I'm not complaining as much.  Hmm.).

I've resorted to setting his grade in SimPe because I am simply insist on getting him into college with his compatriots.

He has another problem.  Are these things related?  His aspirations haven't re rolled in forever, and they're dumb aspirations.  He wants to be best friends forever with another boy in the house, but no matter how much they like each other they don't go above best friends.  He wants to be friends with some girl I've never even seen before that I can remember.  He wants to go to college, which he can't as far as I know because his grade drops to a D every time I blink.  And he wants to make out with 20 sims.  Stupid aspirations, so now he's in the red.

I'm going to try fixing him in SimPe again.  For all I know, every time I fix him I make him worse.  Does it?

Other than this, he functions normally for a sim -- his motives decay at a sane rate and improve with the right inputs (I never used maxmotives before a few days ago, and he doesn't need it now, but I keep throwing it at him so he can power through the night to get more skills -- hoping that more skills would help  him somehow -- and schmoozing with this one guy, which he does quite competently but it makes no difference.  Everybody else inthe house is running green or gold or even platinum all the time as a side effect of me trying to make his life better with the maxmotives crap.  It's boring when the sims are too perfect but it's boring and distressing if nothing you do can make them ok.  That's too much like life.

[rufio]

IIRC, grades not increasing is a problem related to aging off.  I don't remember if there was a way to fix it, but you can always cheat his grade up when the game should have increased it.

Those wants all seem pretty standard, actually.  If you don't want to play the game and actually fulfill any of them, or if there's one that's just a pain in the ass (like the BFF one) you can always ctrl+click on the want and have it fulfill anyway, and it won't usually come back after that, at least not for a while.

[ritaxis]

Right-clicking on a want makes it stay until it's fulfilled.  The problem with Thierry's wants is they don't roll at all the standard times like anybody else's does, and they don't fulfill because of the way they don't match with his condition.  (usually there's one or two mismatched wants, but all four are utterly mismatched in this case: or three out of the four, and the making-out one is just such a longrange one that it's of no use in offsetting the others.  The college one wouldn't be mismatched if his grades wouldn't keep dropping to nothing.  And usually the mismatched wants will ordinarily roll away if you ignore them for a while).  So right-clicking on the want won't fix that problem.

Am I clear that this sims's wants don't do the slot machine juggle at the various times of the day like other sims' do?  They've been the same for weeks?  They don't make the noise, they don't make the blur, they just sit there being stupid.

I thought that aging off might be contributing to the problem rather than solving it, but I'm not playing a gamer's game where it's just a lost round if the sim doesn't go to college: I'm playing a dollhouse game where the fate of the sims matters to me because they are my dollies.  (as I see it the game can be played in several different ways: the dollhouse game can go more than one way, and I'm sure the gamer's game can go in more than one way, and I know at least one person who plays the game more like a model railroad than anything else). So turning aging back on and letting him age out of the college-going window still getting Ds is not an actual solution to me.

So I cheated.  I went into SimPe and I found that his study skill was practically zero.  I don't know why.  He had been doing his homework forever in that Groundhog Day high school I had him stuck in with his brothers, he had asked for homework help, and I had given him all the advantages I could think of.  So I've set his study skill up, I've given him doable aspirations, and I artificially set his grade up because he's the secondary character and I'm tired of holding back my primaries waiting for him to improve.

Does aging off always give you a certain percentage chance of grades going stupid or is there a combination of events that makes it happen?

[Milhouse Trixibelle Saltfucker III]

Ctrl-click != right-click. Try holding the "ctrl" key, or "command" key if you are using inferior hardware, and clicking.
Also,

[rufio]

The grade thing is supposed to happen if you have aging off during the first school day of the age-range, but I have never turned aging off, so I don't actually know.

You say that the wants are "mismatched", but they don't look terribly weird to me.  Sims often roll wants to be friends with sims they only just met; if the person he wants to be friends with isn't in his relationship panel at all you might have something weird or BFBVFS-like going on, but otherwise it's normal.  All teen sims want to go to college, no matter what their grades or aspirations.  I haven't seen BFF wants before, but it sounds reasonable to want to be BFFs with someone who is already a BF.  Sims with low aspiration often roll impossible-type wants depending on their aspiration specifically - for example, I've had Knowledge sims in the red rolling wants to max skills they hadn't even started learning.  Wanting to make out with 20 sims sounds like something a Romance sim would roll in that situation, and Romance sims will roll that want anyway after making out with ten or so different sims.

There are a number of things you can do to make sims' wants reroll, too:
1.  Have them ask someone out on a date.
2.  Have them check out someone they have chemistry with.
3.  Use the Lot Debugger to reroll them.

Since your sim is in the red, this might not be very effective unless you can get him up into green first, either by cheating or by fulfilling some of those wants.

[ritaxis]

Thanks for the ideas.  I do appreciate them, even though I decided on a different approach.  And, Tsenatserix, thanks for the correction.  My reading comprehension must have been taking a snooze -- because I re-read that bit a couple of times, since I couldn't believe I had been given the advice I thought I saw Ias it turned out, my disbelief was correct).

I'm not going to belabor the reasons why I chose a different approach, since they're really not that interesting except to me.

And nbow I've seen, elsewhere, yet other approaches, all currently moot . . .