Demystifying Standardized Testing 2014

Thank you to everyone who braved the cold to attend 'Demystifying Standardized Testing' last night. I hope the information was useful toward better understanding college admission tests.

One thing we, for some reason, always run out of time to cover is the fact that there ARE testing optional colleges where ACT and SAT scores are not required to be submitted in order to attend. These include highly selective schools like Bowdoin and Connecticut College, so if a student ends up not being satisfied with their test scores and feels that their transcript alone puts them in a better light, testing optional schools are always available to consider. For a full list of testing optional schools, go to www.fairtest.org.

But, if you are going to take and submit standardized tests, how does it work? I recommend students explore BOTH the SAT and the ACT. This comparison will allow you to discover if you are naturally more skilled on one exam. Then you should take that exam two times to maximize your score. Data indicates that taking the exam more than two times does not lead to a score increase.

A lot of energy is sometimes spent worrying about sending the scores and using score choice. Neither of these things is worth much time, in my opinion. Just send everything everywhere and your life will be easier. If you have an extreme outlier that you are able to suppress and it makes you feel better, go ahead and do that. But most of these schools have computer systems that automatically super score for the reader, so losing your mind deciding if it is ok for a school to see your 680 in math is a whole lot of stress for not a lot of gain.

All schools will welcome both the ACT and SAT, so it is in your best interest to take the exam that you can score highest on. For a comparison of the scores on these two tests, see this chart.

For more information about how the SAT and ACT differ, see this webpage.

There was also a question during the meeting that I spoke to the parent afterwards and got clarification that that I'd like to share here. The question that was intended to be asked was: in what range should a student be testing on the SAT I to be a viable candidate at colleges that require SAT Subject Tests. I would say that the best candidates at highly selective colleges have a 700 or above on each section of both the SAT and the Subject Tests. That is definitely just a ball park, so plenty of students are admitted with a 690 or a 650 or even less than that on one section, but the majority of admitted students will be starting with a 2000+ on the SAT. 

I'm excited for next Tuesday, when I will be having the Junior College Kick Off for 11th grade students on Tuesday afternoon. After that, junior meetings will begin and the Class of 2015 will be in the thick of it!

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Join me to Demystify Standardized Tests!

 
Tomorrow night (Thursday, January 23), ElRo will host our annual PTA meeting on the topic of standardized college admission tests. I strongly encourage all 9th, 10th, and 11th grade families to come learn more about this topic. It is, without a doubt, the topic that I get the most questions on throughout the year and this session is designed to give basic information about what the tests are, how they are used, how they are unique, and what the recommended timeline is for signing up for the exams. Kaplan will be joining us to present this information -- note this presentation is not specifically about Kaplan test prep, so if you want information about their methods or signing up for their services you will need to contact them separately.

The PTA meeting will begin at 6:00 with the standardized test presentation slated to follow (estimated start time 6:20).

I hope to see you there!

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The time to file the FAFSA is now

2014 is here and for seniors this means that you should be completing your FAFSA in order to be considered for Financial Aid. If you want to pay full sticker price for college, you can stop reading right now. If you don't, you need to use this month to be VERY thoughtful about meeting each and every deadline associated with financial aid at your colleges. Remember when I recommended applying to 10 schools or less? A reason why is that it is difficult to keep 12 or 15 or 18 financial aid policies straight. It is your responsibility to research and understand the financial aid requirements at the colleges where you applied. Don't be left in the future regretting that you didn't know the CSS was due or thinking the FAFSA deadline was the 15th when it was really the 1st.

Remember - NEVER pay a company hundreds or thousands of dollars to complete the FAFSA for you. And the real authentic FAFSA website ends in .gov not .com or .net. You should not use the FAFSA links that are ads at the top of your google search. Your personal financial information is required for this form, only complete it on a secure platform. This should go without saying, but I also do not recommend working on this via your phone, the small screen is not suited for this task.

The link below is posted on the government's website about common FAFSA mistakes - check it out and happy filing! They also mention that the IRS data retrieval tool will go live in early February. As a reminder, this is NOT the year to file an extension, get those 2013 tax returns completed as soon as you have all of the documents you need!

https://www.ed.gov/blog/2014/01/7-common-fafsa-mistakes/