Score At The Top Blog

Although many selective colleges have temporarily gone test-optional because of the pandemic, test-optional doesn’t mean “test-blind.” Not only will test-optional colleges consider your scores if you submit them, but submitting competitive scores that are well into a college’s mid-50% range for admitted students has the potential to improve your admission chances. For students who don’t submit scores, colleges will place far more emphasis on other crucial admission factors, such as your academic record, extracurricular commitment, essays, and recommendations. So, if you’d like to improve your potential for admission, here’s our advice about your junior-year testing calendar. This means YOU, members of the class of 2022:

Topics: ACT, SAT Test, ACT/SAT, Test-Prep, Tutoring, Educational-Consulting

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The Coronavirus has affected almost everything – including college admissions (see here for an expansive view). The recent changes have been dizzying.

In the last two weeks, many colleges, some of them highly selective, have made the SAT/ACT test-optional for applicants – typically as a short-term trial (see below) – with Covid-19 being the proximate cause. For those colleges, waiving their test score requirement will go into effect for the 2020–21 admission cycle and will be evaluated in 2021 (or 2023 for a few) after the close of that cycle in order to determine whether to make the policy ongoing. Here’s our most recent listing of those schools and what they’ve reported about the duration of the change (in years):

Topics: College Admission, ACT/SAT, Educational-Consulting, Test Optional

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With the College Board’s new summer SAT test date (August 26^th) comes an intriguing gambit for high school students who plan to apply to more competitive colleges (and even to those that may not be considered so competitive): taking up to three of the College Board’s 1-hour Subject Tests offered on that date.

Topics: Essays, College Admission, College Planning, Educational-Consulting, Subject Test

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In an attempt to reward some of the top Florida high school students and to help retain those students for college, the Florida State Senate recently passed the "Excellence in Higher Education Act". The bill is currently working its way through the Florida State House of Representatives. If passed, it would substantially increase "Bright Futures Scholarship" awards to Florida college students. 

Topics: ACT/SAT, Test-Prep, Educational-Consulting

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With the January SAT test date a thing of the past, the College Board is now offering a new “summer” SAT.

Most everyone we know in college admissions thinks it’s a good idea, given the college application schedule that students must set for themselves as they approach the senior year.

An August date gives rising seniors the opportunity to take the SAT at least one more time – way before even the early decision/early action deadlines. Before this year, juniors often chose to either test twice in the spring or wait until October or November of senior year to retest. You can still do that, but the August test is opening eyes to a really favorable new option.

Topics: Common Application, Tutoring, Educational-Consulting

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In a January 2013 report titled Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology^>1, researchers, after examining 10 learning techniques, presented their findings about which were more effective…

Topics: ACT, SAT Test, Test Scores, Educational-Consulting

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Prior to the day-before-yesterday, school districts could – and often did, with the concurrence of the courts – argue that they were fulfilling the "free appropriate public education" (FAPE) provision in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) if a non-mainstreamed student with a disability was making progress toward educational goals, however minimal that progress might be.

Topics: News, Public Schools, Special Needs, Educational-Consulting

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If your third grader is a struggling reader, you may be on pins and needles about the upcoming FSA (Florida State-wide Assessment) in the spring. Worrying about whether or not your child will pass the standardized test creates stress at home and in school. Assisting your child with weekly tutoring is one option. There’s also another that your local school may fail to share with you.

Topics: College Planning, Educational-Consulting

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None (zip, zilch, ninguno): That’s how much EFS you had at the moment you were born. And if you didn’t have some now, you wouldn’t have gotten out of bed this morning, because you couldn’t have planned how to do it, and you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

EF skills are controlled in a very small area in the right-front section of your brain – and we know that you’ve got one of those (a brain) or you wouldn’t be reading this – and they get better (in normal people, anyway) until sometime in the early to mid-20’s. Because you’re not there yet, your EFS aren’t as good now as they’re going to be, but you can still use them to very good effect and start making your life better right now.

Topics: Educational-Consulting

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Over the past decade, we have heard strange rumblings from the college haunted house on the hill. That’s the building that contains all the schools who have opted out of requiring the sacred admissions test scores (ACT and SAT) as part the application process. Who’s up there? There are over 800 of them ― predominantly smaller schools, institutions outside the mainstream of “brand name” colleges and universities that most people know about. But there are a few on the hill whose names are on people’s lips, and to that group we can now add George Washington University in our nation’s capital. Surely one of the best known universities to join the movement against admissions tests, GW announced that it will no longer require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores.

Topics: ACT, SAT Test, ACT/SAT, Test-Prep, Educational-Consulting

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