Good Grades

The single most important part of your application is your program of study and your GRADES!


Summer Strategies for High School Students

With standardized test preparation, application writing, and summer reading assignments ramping up as the fall looms on the distant horizon, summer is no time to go academically soft. Just as athletes lose ground without regular practice and training, students can forget math facts and vocabulary words, or begin to slip in writing skills and study habits, if they aren’t intellectually challenged through the summer months. There are three specific areas in which students can get substantially ahead during the school break: standardized test preparation, academic (math, English, and other study) skills, and summer reading. Prepping for Standardized Tests Junior year […]


Finishing STRONG! Tips to Maximize GRADES

It’s easy for juniors to forget during the standardized testing crunch of May and June that the most important thing you can do to get accepted to competitive colleges is to earn the best grades you can in whatever courses you’re taking. Period. Here’s some good advice to remember down the home stretch: Conventional wisdom is that the first impression we make is the most important, but when it comes to impressions grades make on teachers, the LAST impression is the most important, i.e., the most LASTing. Take it from a 20+ year classroom teacher: When teachers go to enter […]


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 […]


Catch the Back-to-School Wave

One of my favorite things to do is bodysurf.  I remember when my dad taught me how on a Florida vacation back in the early, gulp, 1970s.  He 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: all the puny human exertion you can muster against the wave’s weighty power proves useless if you try to fight it.  The trick is to catch the wave just right and then LET […]


Old Class, New Format, Still FREE! Mindfulness-Based Academic Stress & Test Anxiety Reduction Workshop

The format has morphed, but the class in hardly new. Resuming Wednesdays on Jan 5, 2022, Dr. Yo will present and help students practice well-researched and effective techniques to stay focused, in-the-moment, and in control of their thoughts!   Come to one, or come to one a week, always FREE.   Wednesdays nights 7-8pm ET.   Click for FREE Registration


Using the Summer to Gain a Competitive Edge

What are the best three things about the school year?  Duh.  June, July and August of course!  Camp, summer jobs, new friends and relationships, and, most importantly, NO SCHOOL! The long summer break is a double-edged sword, however: very few use the summer to advance their learning or to advance their chances in the college admissions game.  Given the increasingly competitive nature of the game, summertime represents a phenomenal opportunity for ambitious students not only to enhance their education (not to mention keeping up with the international competition, who are in school 10 or 11 months out of the year), […]


When Research Isn’t Research: It’s not Just Semantics

My work with a really bright junior at a top college that many CPE students would cut off their right arms to get into occasioned a recent epiphany: The word research means two very different things through high school and in popular culture on the one hand and in higher education and scholarly discourse on the other. Same word, but two things that are more dissimilar than similar. As early as grade school and as generally used outside of academia, research means to look into, find out, investigate, learn. I’m researching the Star Is Born movie times now. I just discovered […]


7 Tips for Writing New Year’s Resolutions in the College Admissions Game

On behalf of everyone at CollegePrepExpress, I wish you a healthy, productive, successful, and HAPPY 2017! I’m a great believer 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 you choose. But there are two ideal times for students, in particular, to pause for serious introspection and reassessment and to set new goals: the beginning of the academic year and the beginning of the calendar year. So NOW would be a great time to sit down with paper and pen, or screen and […]


The College Admissions Process 101

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 […]


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. […]


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: […]


How to THINK about Math

As a teacher of both English and Math for over two decades, I’ve had a unique opportunity to witness how the same student OFTEN thinks completely differently about math and EVERYTHING ELSE. Every year I work with really bright, hard-working students who exercise impressive critical thinking and cognitive firepower in the humanities and in life in general, but as soon as a problem is written down in a math book or on a math section of a standardized test, their IQ seems to fall precipitously as their eyes glaze over and their shoulders start to shrug. I’ll tell you, people, […]


Parent Tip #17: Buy Your Kids’ Subject Test and/or AP Test Prep Books EARLY IN THE SCHOOL YEAR

The best prep for either a Subject Test (the one-hour, subject specific tests required by many top schools) and the more rigorous AP Exams (given in May, near the conclusion of each AP course) is a well-designed class and a good teacher. Sometimes students get lucky and need little extra prep because their class was so solid; MOST students, however, need to prepare for each Subject Test and AP Exam in much the same way they do for the SATs and ACTs, that is, by purchasing a book (or two or three) and learning material and taking practice tests.   […]


7 Tips for Writing New Year’s Resolutions in the College Admissions Game

On behalf of everyone at CollegePrepExpress, I wish you a healthy, productive, successful, and HAPPY NEW YEAR! I’m a great believer in the old adage 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 you choose. But there are two ideal times for students in particular to pause for serious introspection and reassessment and to set new goals: the beginning of the academic year and the beginning of the calendar year. So NOW would be a great time to sit down with paper […]


The 2012 PSATs are Over!….Now What?

Some of you took the PSAT on Wednesday this past week, and the rest of you will take it tomorrow. For many, so begins your foray into the wonderful world of high stakes, college admissions testing. That’s the bad news. The good news, though, is that you get a little standardized-test break in the otherwise nonstop bombardment that is the junior year in American high school. So what’s the next best move? Good question, glad you asked.  THREE suggestions: FOCUS ON YOUR SCHOOL WORK. Remember you’re in school primarily to, um, get an education. So buckle down and try that […]