Senior Year

The College Admissions Process 101

by

1. Get the best grades in the most advanced classes you can. The first thing college admissions officers look for in evaluating any application is your curriculum and grades. The most effective way to become an attractive candidate is to impress them with your coursework and GPA. If you need help raising your grade in any particular subject(s), our outstanding tutors can help.  2. Learn as much as you can about the application process by reading blogs and listening to podcasts. There are many pieces to the puzzle, and they cannot be figured out overnight. Carve out time to investigate all the elements […]

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

by

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

by

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 

by

   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

by

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 […]

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

by

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 […]

To Parents & Teachers: When the Carrot Beats the Stick

by

This post is for the grown-ups, the parents and teachers, and fair warning, I’m going to get personal. The month between Halloween and Thanksgiving marks the peak of college application writing for CPE students—an exciting, nerve-wracking rite of passage for our university-bound teens, who are full of energy, excitement, apprehension, and wonderment about their immediate and long-term futures. It’s a precious time, psychologically speaking, when the window of vulnerability and teachability may open wider than normal. I believe it’s one of the most important times to try extra hard to be encouraging rather than discouraging. I say this from two […]

‘Twas The Night Before Early Action… A Note to PARENTS

by

By Kate Cryan Let’s time-travel for a moment. Not into a time with hoverboards or flying cars, but just a few short days or weeks into the future, to the first application deadline. It’s the day before the application deadline of your teen’s first choice college, and time to click the “Submit” button on the CommonApp. If it had been up to you, this button would have been hit at least a couple of weeks ago, if not before, but, sadly, it *wasn’t* up to you. No; the task lay with your resident high-schooler who, for the last few months, has suffered from a […]

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

by

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

by

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

by

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

 tagged academics / grades / school by

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: […]

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

 tagged ACT / strategies / test prep by

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

by

 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 […]

Winning the Battle of CommonApp ’13

 tagged admissions / CommonApp by

If you’re a high school senior, the last few weeks might have been more fraught than you’d anticipated, even taking into account that college application season is never a relaxed time. Halloween party planning or watching the Red Sox’ march to victory in the World Series could have taken a back seat while, instead, you spent your evenings in front of the computer, watching the Spinning Beach Ball of Death on the screen and hoping that – this time, please, please, please – the CommonApp would cooperate and accept your college application before the deadline. Or before you hurled your […]