Score At The Top Blog

Most colleges¹ admit a far greater percentage of students who apply Early Decision (ED) or Early Action (EA) than they do of students who apply Regular Decision (RD). In fact, an article posted on usnews.com in December 2010 contains data on 52 colleges for which that was true. At that time the increased chances of gaining admission to those colleges by applying ED or EA instead of RD ranged from 1.41 to 2.98 – or an average of 1.88. In short, students who applied ED or EA to those colleges were, on average, almost twice as likely to get accepted as were those who applied RD.

Topics: College Admission, College Counseling, Early Decision, Early Action

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One thing that you absolutely DO NOT want to do is confuse college admissions officers by presenting contradictory – or inconsistent, and, thus, possibly contradictory – information about yourself in your college applications. And there are multiple opportunities for mistakes in most college applications.

Topics: College Admission, College Application, College Counseling, Activity Resume, Resume

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In our recent blog entitled Clearing Up Confusion About the College Application Personal Statement, we explained that “It doesn’t matter in the slightest what you write about for your Common and Coalition Application personal statements — as long as it’s about you. What does matter is what you say and how you say it, because you should have clear objectives, and we’ll provide you with advice on that matter in future blogs.” Here’s the first installment for you.

Topics: College Admission, Application Essays, Person Statement, Essay

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At this time of year, it’s typical to see rising seniors agonize over what they should write for their college application personal statement. While some colleges have their own applications and unique personal statement prompts, most schools use the Common Application or the Coalition Application, each with its own set of essay prompts. Here they are for each application for 2018-19:

Topics: College Admission, Application Essays, Person Statement, Essay

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While “Demonstrated Interest” (DI) may not carry significant weight for many colleges…it will be important if the school is highly selective with a competitive admissions process.

Topics: College Admission, Demonstrated Interest

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Typing “where should I go to college?” into Google’s search engine yields over one billion hits — and while we’d encourage students to do that and then explore some of the “first page” results, mainly for learning purposes, it’s a far too cumbersome way to find a meaningful answer to the question. Fortunately, we’re here to get you started the right way. We’ll share with you our more than 30 years of experience in helping students find their best-fit colleges by discussing four important parameters you should consider in order to narrow your choices:

Topics: College Admission, College Planning, College Choice

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We closed Part 1 of this blog post by saying that Part 2 would be up-coming soon and would cover one of the most important ways to reduce college costs even more – by improving scores on standardized tests. So, here’s Part 2.

Topics: ACT, Test Scores, College Admission, ACT/SAT, College Planning, Financial, Investment

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We put you in the shoes of college admissions officers, so that you can sense their point of view with these facts:

Topics: College Admission, College Application, College Counseling, College Planning, Educational-Consulting

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From five Florida State University System schools, we have this important information about submitting the Student Self-Reported Academic Record (SSAR).

Topics: College Admission, College Application, College Planning

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Well, no. We lied: There is no magic formula for writing the perfect college application essay.

The essays in “Essays That Worked for College Applications” (subtitled “50 Essays that Helped Students Get into the Nation’s Top Colleges”) vary wildly and include “think pieces,” multiple-panel cartoons, poems, and short plays, among others. There is no prototypical essay because there is no prototypical admissions officer: they’re human beings, just like you and I are, and they have differing tastes, just like you and I do.

Topics: Essays, College Admission

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