Junior Year


ACTs Less Than a Week Away? 5 Pro Tips to Raise Your Scores REALLY Fast

Good time management on the ACT, even more than on the SAT, is crucial for getting high scores. And the cool thing is, relatively speaking, it doesn’t take long to master or to see its impact on your composite score. Is a few days enough time? Yup, if you’re dedicated. It’s basically a matter of knowing the format of each of the five tests really well. You don’t want to be the kid who, when the proctor says turn the page and begin, blurts out, “Hey! There’s Science on this test?!”   Those who become students of the exam–that is, […]


Standardized Test Prep Made Simple: Tip Sheet for Preparing for SATs and ACTs

Preparing for high-stakes standardized tests like the SAT or the ACT is not EASY, but it is SIMPLE. What I mean by that is much of the work is psychological: you need to make a decision to invest the necessary time, plan your work, and then work your plan. For years instructors at CollegePrepExpress have been helping students get high scores by showing them that preparation for these behemoth exams is really the same as that for any other test: it involves TWO basic activities: studying the material covered on the exam and taking practice tests to give you facility […]


Why CPE’s Super-Value Math Class (for SAT, ACT, Level 1 Subject Test, and Final Exam Prep) Is a Genius IDEA 

   For further details on the class, visit our 4-in-1 Super Value Math page Dr. Yo’s 4-in-1 Super-Value Math Class is one of those rare gems that makes excellent sense for the vast majority of high school students. The problem is, most students and parents either don’t know that it exists, or they don’t immediately see how it can prove so tremendously beneficial in their particular case. The purpose of this blog post is to redress that unfortuante situation. The concept underpinning the class is to offer high school students in grades 9-12 instruction and practice on the SPECIFIC BODY OF MATHEMATICAL […]


My Two-College, Overnight Visits

Guest CPE-Blog post by Amanda Youmans, Hall High Junior Like second-semester junior year isn’t hectic enough already! Nevertheless, this past Monday and Tuesday marked my first foray into the world of overnight college visits, which my dad tells me is important in figuring out where I’m going to spend the fours years after I graduate from high school next June. Visiting a college is like going to a museum. Some parts are fascinating, some parts you don’t connect with at all, and in some parts someone is somehow telling you not to touch something (pro-tip: don’t poke the professors). My […]


The Best Time for an SAT/ACT Combo Class: Long-Term SAT, ACT, and Subject Test Planning for Sophomores and Juniors

The more experience I get, the less inclined I am toward generalizations. That’s true in life outside of work, and that’s true of the many students with whom we work at CPE, from public or private school, New England or Florida, state school or ivy bound. With all the athletic, extracurricular, personal, and academic variables in busy high school juniors’ lives, it’s very difficult to make recommendations based on sweeping generalizations that actually apply to all or even most juniors. Having said that, here’s a sweeping generalization and recommendation based on 25 years experience specializing in helping students get into colleges […]


How to Interpret PSAT Scores in the College Admissions Game and What They Mean for your Standardized Test-Taking Future

It’s been about a month since your PSAT scores came back, so it’s high time you stepped out from the darkness of denial and into the light of Holy crap! Can I still get into college? Do they count? What do they mean? What’s with the funny scale? How do they translate to SAT scores? To ACT scores? Can I use them to decide whether I’d be better at SATs or ACTs? Am I having fun yet? Settle down, young grasshopper. We got you. Most importantly, the PSAT only counts if you do well :-). There’s no downside, no way […]


Dr. Yo’s Top 2 Tips for Reading Comprehension/Concentration on the PSAT, SAT, ACT, Literature Subject Test, and AP Lit exams

Reading  comprehension tests are, in most cases, a misnomer. Passages on the SAT, ACT, Literature Subject Test, and AP English exams do not typically test students’ ability to COMPREHEND the material; they test students’ ability to pay attention to what they’re reading. This is a very important distinction, particularly when it comes to confidence. When students perform poorly on a reading comprehension test, or at a level less than they’d expect,  the reason is not likely that they can’t COMPREHEND the passage, but rather than they weren’t paying close enough attention; that is, they weren’t concentrating on what they were reading. […]


Dr. Yo’s 6 Tips for September Goal Setting

September is always a month of great beauty and of great energy in the academic world. The start of a new academic calendar every September—as a career academic, I’ve always put more stock in the Sept-June than the Jan-Dec calendar—is a great time for self-assessment and goal setting. If you haven’t sat down yet and made some goals for yourself for the new school year, now would be a great time. 🙂 I just did mine and posted them on the fridge where they can serve as a motivation (or admonishing reminder) of what I want to accomplish for myself in 2014-2015. […]


Dr. Yo’s Short- and Long-Term Steps to Higher SAT Scores

There are basically two ways to prep for the SATs and ACTs, otherwise known as the college entrance exams: slow-and-steady and cram-like-hell. Know which one’s better? BOTH.  If your goal is to be competitive at the nation’s top colleges, I recommend you prep slow-and-steady over the long haul (one to two years for most) AND cram like hell at the end. For those with less ambitious goals or where there are constraints of time and/or budget, you may choose to select a one vs. the other approach. This week I offer you CollegePrepExpress’s plans for short- and long-term prep for the SAT for students sitting for the exam between October 2014 […]


Catch the Back-to-School Wave

One of my favorite things to do is to bodysurf.  I remember when my dad taught me how on a Florida vacation back in the early, gulp, 1970s. (This past weekend I had the privilege of teaching my daughter at East Beach in RI–hey, never mind that her first effort resulted in a complete heels over head 360). My father explained how good timing enables you to harness the full force of the swell just as the whitecaps begin to break at the crest of the wave.  If you jump too early or scramble to catch up, you’ll miss it: […]


College Admissions Secrets for Parents and Teens: Listen to Mom’s Advice

By Kate Cryan, mom If you’re looking for an entertaining, informative, and inexpensive evening for you and your college-bound teens, head to Hall High School at 7pm on Wednesday March 12th, where Dr. Michael J. Youmans (aka Dr. “Yo”) of CollegePrepExpress will present a 90-minute “soup to nuts” overview of the college admissions process. College admission is a daunting process for both student and parents, and it makes no difference to the parents’ stress levels whether it’s the first or fifth child going to college.  (As a parent with one child nearly finished at college, I can vouch that starting […]


5-Point Checklist to Prep for the ACT in a Week…or Less!

If you’re taking the ACTs this weekend and haven’t been able to prepare as thoroughly as you’d like—understandable given the SATs and/or January midterms many of you faced—do not despair. Because there’s no vocabulary on the exam, you don’t need to spend nearly as much time studying as you do for the SAT. The ACT is, in fact,   a much more “beatable” test than the SAT, especially when time is short. Whereas the SAT requires a huge chunk of STUDY time to master all the abstruse vocabulary (see what I did there?), ACT prep places a premium on taking […]


3 Things to Do with Your Recently Arrived PSAT Scores

 So your wake-up call came this week in the form of PSAT scores from the CollegeBoard. Now what? Decide whether you’re an SAT kid, an ACT kid, both, or neither. Because the PSAT is a really good indicator of how well you’d do on the SAT (just add a zero to each score; e.g., a 53 PSAT –> 530 SAT), we typically advise students take an ACT in December or February with which to compare to your PSAT results. Use any number of freely available conversion charts e.g., ACT’s charts, CollegeBoard’s charts) to help you decide how to allocate test-prep […]


Got ACT on 9/21? 5 Tips for Cramming

If you’re taking the ACT next weekend and haven’t been able to prepare as thoroughly as you’d like—hey, we understand, end of summer, start of school, yada yada yada—do not despair. Because there’s no vocabulary on the exam, you don’t need to spend nearly as much time studying as you do for the SAT. The ACT is, in fact, a much more “beatable” test than the SAT, especially when time is short. There are two bodies of material you need to know: math (key topics in Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, and a wee bit of Trig) and 10 key […]


Gearing Up for JUNIOR YEAR!

Listen To Education Internet Radio Stations with CollegePrepExpress on BlogTalkRadio Junior year is a notoriously dreaded year of high school. But forewarned is forearmed! Join Dr. Yo and his panel of TEEN EXPERTS, all successful rising seniors with fresh firsthand experience of the dreaded junior year, including Lauren Belizzi (Northwest Catholic ’14), Justin Kilian (Hall ’14), Jake Leshem (KO ’14), and Simon Bellemare (Choate ’14). We’ll be having a conversation about what rising juniors should be thinking about as they gear up for their penultimate year in HS.   Topics include: Classes & grades Extracurrics & Community Service Sports Standardized […]