Test Prep Tips: CATES Blog

So.

You worked on your standardized test scores, got your grades up, got awesome recommendations, and sent in your applications. You bit your fingernails, paced back and forth, and waited until the day when the envelope came in the mail from the college of your dreams. You opened it eagerly, and read the letter inside, which let you know that you had been…put on the waitlist.

Oh.

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What is Score Choice? What is Super Scoring? What’s the difference?

When you are taking the SAT exam many hours go into studying and preparing for the exam.  You take mocktests, work on practice problems, and formulate your perfect strategy to beat the test. Then you take the SAT test and, for many people, the work ends here. Don’t be one of these people. You still have a couple strategies you can consider.

One of them is Score Choice.  The College Board, the company that creates and administers the SAT, allows you to implement Score Choice if you so choose.  Essentially, Score choice allows you to elect which SAT score you can submit to colleges.  If you take the SAT multiple times, Score Choice enables you to select your best score and submit that score, and that score alone, to colleges.  There are some schools that require you to submit all your test results and your college counselor will know which ones, but Score Choice allows you, whenever possible, to put your best foot forward.

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If you took the March 2012 SAT, on the morning of Thursday, March 29th you may well have anxiously went online to your College Board account to see your score. For some of you – maybe too many – the scores you saw on the screen may have surprised you…and not in a good way, perhaps. Whatever the case, after sifting through the input of countless students, here’s what we understand as of today, before the online score reports and Student Answer Service data is available:

Students – Virtually every one of them – are seeing expected scores in the Writing section, scores within the lower bound of their mock test median range on Math, but a huge drop (70–100 points) from mock test medians on their Critical Reading.

Experimental Section & Section Sequencing Affected Focus

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What are some good tips to writing a successful school essay?

If you find yourself struggling with school essay assignments, and everyone does, there are some helpful guidelines you can follow to craft a successful essay. The first essay tip is simply to use all the time you are allotted. Most teachers will give you a few days to a week to work on a paper and you should use all that time. Your teacher is expecting you to.  Even if that means only thinking about the assignment at the beginning, you need to begin the intellectual process of crafting an essay as soon as you are given the assignment.

Make one point in your essay.  Every successful English paper or history paper is centered on a singular thesis. This isn’t to say you can articulate many ideas about a subject along the way, but the focus of your writing must be unitary for your ideas to cohere.  Once you’ve boiled your ideas down to a singular, central thesis, you can begin to plan your essay.

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What is the right time to apply to college?  Are there advantages and disadvantages to different times?

As students end their junior year of high school and begin to look around the corner to their senior year, the topic foremost on their minds tends to be college. Within that, students and parents are undergoing the process of creating and editing a college list. Over the course of college visits, reading brochures, talking to friends, college counselors, and family, students are forming an idea of the kind of school they want to attend. Then comes the decision of applying to college early or not.

There are two kinds of early decision options open to applicants in the college process.  One is early decision, which requires a student to submit his or her application around November 1^st of his or her senior year. The student will then usually be notified by December15th whether the college accepted, rejected or deferred them to regular decision. There are a couple of big advantages to early decision. The first is that the acceptance rate tends to be higher in this round than in the regular decision round.

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