Free Help for Writing/Finishing YOUR CommonApp
Five Meaty Tips for Writing Your CommonApp Activities List Tip Sheet
College
SAT versus ACT, A Side-By-Side Analysis, Part 1 of 3
In March 2016, the CollegeBoard rolled out a completely redesigned SAT, which they’d been planning and perfecting since 2012, the first year they were outsold by the ACT. Although all the changes were ultimately based on (or perhaps justified by) sound educational principles, whenever CollegeBoard representatives spoke about the specific changes or whenever articles were published about them, in almost every case they made the SAT more like the ACT, at least on the surface. These changes included the following: removing the guessing penalty; moving from five answer choices to four; replacing challenging vocabulary with simpler “words in context” and […]
Working with your HS Guidance Counselor: Creating a Foundation to Maximize Acceptance to College
by Dr. Yo, with contributions from Anthony Faulise (originally posted June, 2020) For better or worse, college counselors play a significant role in every U.S. high school student’s journey to college, influencing many aspects of the entire application process, from the selection of schools to admissions committees’ final decisions. College counselors have substantial administrative responsibilities both for their school’s particular guidance program and for each of their individual students’ applications, including coordinating letters of recommendation, sending official high school transcripts and mid-year reports, arranging information sessions with regional directors and other college representatives, helping to run college nights and other […]
Prepping for the Personal Essay: Who Are We and How Did We Get This Way? Aka, Two Apples a Day…
[Originally posted 6/16/20, but still all true in 2023, and you can’t say that about MANY things.] There are many ways to understand who we are. We are, for example, in a literal sense, what we EAT and drink and breathe. When we digest things, we literally take the external world and make it part of ourselves (hence the magic of the pig, who, as Jim Gaffigan has noted, can take an apple—basically garbage—and miraculously turn it into bacon!). Less literally, we are the sum total of our THOUGHTS and FEELINGS, in that what we think about all day and […]
Great 2023-24 SAT/ACT Plan for Rising JUNIORS Applying to SELECTIVE Colleges
My kid wants to consider applying to at least SOME selective schools. Which college entrance exam should s/he take, and when should s/he start? Please bear in mind we’d really like him/her to have a great junior year, especially academically, and s/he’s signed up for some super tough classes with some super tough teachers…. Great questions, great qualification, so glad you asked! Many CT juniors wait until spring of junior year to get started climbing up the college entrance exam mountain, largely because, for the past several years, CT Public high schoolers get to take TWO SATs in March, one […]
Writing College Applications in the Sweet Spot: June, July & August
Many college-bound students make one of two critical mistakes when it comes time to thinking through and writing college applications: they do it too soon, or they do it too late. Too soon, you say? Clearly you haven’t met my mother. Is there really such a thing? Yes, there really is. Emphatically so. Many high school teachers and administrators, both public and private, do their juniors a disservice when they stress them out about writing college applications during the spring of junior year. It’s one thing to go through the personal essay prompts and even write a MOCK essay for the […]
TWOFERS: Why April Is a Fabulous Test Prep Month for Most Juniors
Each year there are 14 total national college admissions exams offered (seven each of the SAT and ACT), making 14 total opportunities (not including individual State in-school exams, e.g., March in CT). As you can see in the linear academic calendar, these exams are fairly evenly distributed across the 12 months (one each approximately every 7.5 weeks), with a couple of notable exceptions. Twice a year each, in Oct/Nov and June/July for the ACT, and in Oct/Nov and May/June for the SAT, two exams each are offered closer to ONE MONTH apart than two, and the 3+ week difference does […]
7 Tips for Writing New Year’s Resolutions in the College Admissions Game
On behalf of everyone at CollegePrepExpress, I wish you a happy, productive, successful, and COVID-free 2023! At CPE, we’re great believers that “today is the first day of the rest of your life,” that you can choose to wipe the slate clean and start fresh any day and time you choose, with new thinking, new activities, new routines, and, over time, new habits. But there are two ideal times for students, in particular, to pause for serious introspection and reassessment, two ideal times to set new goals: the beginning of the academic year and the beginning of the calendar year. So RIGHT […]
A Vacation Exercise Tip from Harvard Law School
For those who like to exercise… and those who exercise even when they don’t like it 😉 Like most other freshmen at Harvard, I lived in the Yard my first year, which, alas, was sometime during the last century 😂. It turns out, the Yard is closer to Harvard Law School than any of the upperclassmen houses, and I had a close friend who had his eye on attending HLS after graduation. (P.S. He did, and yes, he made Law Review just like his dad. Anyway.) Because he’s sharp, Ben spent more time on the Law School campus next door than […]
If I got rejected, does that mean I’m a failure?
Absolutely not! And I’m not trying to offer false solace; I’m offering an understanding of simple math. Single- and low double-digit acceptance rates are REAL. If you got rejected from a school with, say, a 30% acceptance rate, then to consider yourself a failure means you’d also have to consider 7 out of every 10 college bound applicants to that colleges failures, too. Likewise, if a school with a 10% acceptance rate dings you (and many rates have spiraled to less than HALF that since 2020), then you’d have to consider 9 out of every 10 failures. And that would […]
Are You Helping or Hurting Your Kids’ Chances? Common Myths About How to Get into Selective Colleges in 2022 and Beyond!
The mythological “intel” below may SOUND reasonable enough, but applicants who heed such advice often find themselves disconsolate when admission decision postings and letters come out… Academic Standardized Tests Activities Application Writing Miscellaneous Learn about these MYTHS in today’s admissions game and find out who advice DOES work in our Monthly College Admissions Zoom Talks for Parents & Teens…with Dr. Yo We’re here to help! 🤓
How Helping Others Helps Yourself in (Life and) the College Admissions Game
I hate it when I hear super nerdy geeks complaining about grades in the 90s. Don’t get me wrong, the best students are super nerdy geeks, but as a lifelong card-carrying member of that hard luck tribe, even I was satisfied with any academic assessment if the first digit was a nine. I was also never one to whine about a minus following a letter grade, so long as that letter were formed by line segments only (self-denigrating laughing emoji here). But seriously, with all the experience and best-intentions to help students have the best chance of acceptance to top […]
Swimming in Friendlier Admissions Pools
Think higher SAT/ACT scores can’t greatly impact your or your your kid’s college list and final admissions decisions in today’s misrepresented and misunderstood “test optional” era? Oops. For various windy and partisan reasons, many educators, politicians, and business people denigrate standardized college entrance exams and minimize their actual impact on admissions decisions, but they’re wrong to do so: It’s simply not factually true for a huge range of students applying to selective and highly selective colleges. Just this fall, many CPE students, currently seniors, including a young woman from Texas and two young men from NJ and CT, now have […]
PRIORITIZING and MANAGING TIME for High School Seniors
For most college students attending competitive schools, the two most important skills they can develop in high school are writing and prioritizing/managing time. This CPE blog has many posts on the former (e.g., Getting the Words Right; see also Search bar in menu at right), so this one is about the latter, especially targeting college-bound seniors, who probably have the greatest fall-semester demands of all high school students. PRIORITIZING refers to figuring out and balancing what’s most important and most urgent, while TIME MANAGEMENT refers to allocating time according to priorities to maximize bottom-line results. With regard to prioritizing, note […]
A1 Tip for High School Success and College Admissions
If you’ve done any reading at all about writing compelling applications to college, whether on this blog (see, for example, Passion Is No Ordinary Word) or elsewhere, you know that the number one buzz word is passion. People are passionate about millions of things, from ideas and principles to sports and other collaborative activities to music and other performing arts to computers and technology to volunteer work and community service and on and on), but all these varied manifestations of passion share one thing in common: a deep commitment, a visceral inclination, a kind of love. Admissions committees can tell […]
