College Board Simplifies Request Process For Test Accommodations

College Board Announces New SAT® Testing Supports for English Language Learners

NEW YORK—The College Board has overhauled its request process for testing accommodations, making it easier for eligible students to receive the support they need on College Board assessments.

Beginning January 1, 2017, the vast majority of students who are approved for and using testing accommodations at their school through a current Individualized Education Program (IEP) or 504 Plan will have those same accommodations automatically approved for taking the SAT®, PSAT10, PSAT/NMSQT®, SAT Subject Tests, and AP® Exams. Most private school students with a current, formal school-based plan that meets College Board criteria will also have their current accommodations automatically approved for College Board exams. This streamlined process builds on the College Board’s August 2016 expansion of testing accommodations that can be approved directly by schools without the need for additional documentation.

Read full release here: https://www.collegeboard.org/releases/2016/college-board-simplifies-request-process-for-test-ccommodations?ep_ch=PR&ep_mid=11326140&ep_rid=163330058

The Future of SAT Subject Tests

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Why are Subject Tests required by drastically fewer colleges than a decade ago? Is the relevance and popularity of the tests actually diminishing? Are the tests likely to survive or will they be discontinued by the College Board?

The perceived necessity of College Board’s Subject Tests has been on the decline since 2005 when the SAT II Writing test was essentially folded into the SAT. Subject Tests are explicitly required (no substitutions or exceptions) by only five U.S. colleges, about 90% fewer than just a decade ago. Read more via this helpful Compass post. 

What Do College Counselors Do?

College building

Great post from the Princeton Review on college counselors—high school and independent. Give it a read to learn more about both!

College counselors—both school counselors and independent consultants—can play a huge role in your college search. And when it comes time to apply and evaluate schools, both can help you make that all-important decision.

High School Counselors

Your school counselor can help you:

  • Stay on top of class selection and graduation requirements
  • Navigate your high school’s processes for
    • Getting letters of recommendation from teachers
    • Completing the counselor letter of recommendation
    • Sending your official transcript to colleges
  • Select extracurricular activities
  • Research colleges and draft your college list
  • Answer your FAFSA questions
  • Find and apply for local scholarships
  • Complete and send your applications

Your school college counselor can be an invaluable resource! That said, the national average student-to-counselor ratio is 350:1. And if you go to a large high school with more than 2,000 students, your student-to-counselor ratio may be closer to 500:1 (Source: The College Board).

Depending on the amount of face time they get with their school counselor, some families decide to hire independent college counselors to guide them through the admissions process.

Independent College Counselors

An independent college counselor works alongside your school counselor to help you with all of the above, and in addition:

Whereas your school counselor can advise you on more than just college, independent counselors spend all their time on college counseling and tend to work with fewer students.

Are you looking for strategic college advice based on your personality and goals? Our College Counselors will help you find, apply, and get accepted to your dream school. Get a personalized college admissions plan today!

No College Talk Thanksgiving

Great article yesterday in the New York Times. Parents of seniors give it a read!

If you have a high school senior, and your child has decided to apply somewhere early decision (or early action or early something or other), the application is most likely in and done by now. And with Thanksgiving approaching, my first piece of advice is that you shelter your high school senior from her or his loving family this Thanksgiving by absolutely prohibiting any talk of college and applications.

Believe me, your senior does not want to discuss this. Not with uncles, aunts, cousins or loving grandparents. The right thing to do under these circumstances is for the parents to tell everyone that college is a forbidden subject — and the best way to explain that is to say, we are all sick of it, and we have promised ourselves and our child a respite. Let’s all find another subject.

Happy Thanksgiving!

How to Interpret New ACT Score Reports

 

The redesigned ACT student score reports aim to contextualize students’ scores and offer details about students’ individual strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, these goals are impeded by the overwhelming volume of information included on score reports.

This excellent post from Compass breaks down the exact contents of the student score report and explores how both students and parents can benefit from the information.

Why You Need a College Counselor

 

Most high schools have at least one on-site college counselor to advise students on finding and applying to colleges. As the point person for your applications, college counselors keep you on top of deadlines and graduation requirements and ultimately send your official transcript to colleges. They can also help you find schools that fit you, identify dream/match/safety schools, complete your FAFSA, craft strong school-specific application essays, and help manage anxiety and stress.

Depending on how much one-on-one time they get with their schools’ college counselors, some families decide to hire independent college counselors to guide them through the admissions process. I always tell parents who are thinking about hiring an independent college counselor to make sure that person is a member of a professional organization, like IECA or NACAC. Why? Because not all IEC’s are created equal. For example, IECA members have met the highest standards of the profession. IECA’s required qualifications include a master’s degree; at least three years of admissions counseling experience; and experience working with scores of students. IECA also requires extensive member undertake campus visits—members, on average, have visited over 150 campuses each—and continue to visit an average of 35 campuses annually.

Whichever route you go, check out this Princeton Review article that outlines five (accurate) reasons you need your college counselor. You can also read more about IECs from IECA here, or from me directly during a consultation!

UPenn’s New Way of Reading Applications

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Penn is encouraging other universities to pilot a team admissions strategy that Penn implemented four years ago—and Swarthmore has already adopted it.

The tactic is used to increase efficiency, fairness and morale among college admission officers. Under the old system, admissions staff would divide applications and read them individually, usually on self-set hours in solitude. After reading, officers would write up notes with their thoughts and a recommendation to reject, defer, or advance the candidate in the admissions process.

Under Penn’s new regimen, admissions officers split into teams of two and read one application at the same time in the office. Then they discuss the application together and come to a consensus before passing it along.

After the team of two screens the application, it is given to admission officers responsible for the geographic region where the applicant lives. An exceptional applicant may skip this step and be handed immediately to a selection committee that includes school-based representatives. This committee will make the final decision on a potential acceptance.

“Penn, along with many other schools, has had an increasing number of applicants every year and yet they keep to the same timetable,” said Laurie Kopp Weingarten, director of admissions counseling at One-Stop College Counseling. “They have to release the decisions on the same date.”

It is in Penn’s interest to process applications efficiently: from 2002 to 2012, total applications to Penn increased from 18,827 to 31,280. Last year Penn received more than 37,000 applications.

“We also are doing the work in a more efficient way,” said Dean of Admissions Eric Furda. “We don’t have four times as many people in this office as when we had 10,000 applications.”

Penn has held conferences with admissions officers from other universities to introduce them to the method.

“We started with regional schools to come take a look at the work that we were doing to as a way of a) sharing our experiences but then also b) getting a larger groupthink over the work we were doing,” Furda said.

Swarthmore adopted Penn’s method of application reading with small alterations after two admissions officers from Swarthmore saw a presentation at Penn.

“It was different from what we were currently doing but we were really excited about it,” said J.T. Duck, director of admissions at Swarthmore. “We decided to adopt it because it looked like a more viable way of still doing holistic admissions but getting through applications in a more efficient manner than in a past.”

After seeing a 40 percent surge of applications in the 2014-15 application cycle, Swarthmore was looking to improve their application reading process.

Duck is satisfied with the switch. The new process relieves the isolation that admission officers can experience while reading applications for weeks on end, and allows officers to train each other while reading.

Dean Furda compared the new process to an in-class midterm instead of a take-home test.

“When it’s complete, it’s complete,” he said. “And then you go on.”

Source: The DP

Get Smarter: The Buffett Formula

“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”
— Charlie Munger

“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.”
— Charlie Munger

Most people go though life not really getting any smarter. Why? They simply won’t do the work required.

It’s easy to come home, sit on the couch, watch TV, and zone out until bedtime rolls around. But that’s not really going to help you get smarter.

Sure you can go into the office the next day and discuss the details of last night’s episode of Mad Men or Game of Thrones. Sure you know what happened on Survivor. But that’s not knowledge accumulation, it’s a mind-numbing sedative.

You can acquire knowledge if you want it.

In fact there is a simple formula, which if followed is almost certain to make you smarter over time. Simple but not easy.

It involves a lot of hard work.

We’ll call it the Buffett formula, named after Warren Buffett and his longtime business partner at Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger. These two are an extraordinary combination of minds. They are also learning machines.

“I can see, he can hear. We make a great combination.”
— Warren Buffett, speaking of his partner and friend, Charlie Munger.

We can learn a lot from them. They didn’t get smart because they are both billionaires. No, in fact they became billionaires, in part, because they are smart. More importantly, they keep getting smarter. And it turns out that they have a lot to say on the subject.

How to get smarter

Read. A lot.

Warren Buffett says, “I just sit in my office and read all day.”

What does that mean? He estimates that he spends 80 percent of his working day reading and thinking.

“You could hardly find a partnership in which two people settle on reading more hours of the day than in ours,” Charlie Munger commented.

When asked how to get smarter, Buffett once held up stacks of paper and said he “read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.”

All of us can build our knowledge but most of us won’t put in the effort.

One person who took Buffett’s advice, Todd Combs, now works for the legendary investor. He took Buffett’s advice seriously and started keeping track of what he read and how many pages he was reading.

The Omaha World-Herald writes:

Eventually finding and reading productive material became second nature, a habit. As he began his investing career, he would read even more, hitting 600, 750, even 1,000 pages a day.

Combs discovered that Buffett’s formula worked, giving him more knowledge that helped him with what became his primary job — seeking the truth about potential investments. [Omaha World-Herald]

But how you read matters too.

You need to be critical and always thinking. You need to do the mental work required to hold an opinion.

In Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed Buffett comments to author Michael Eisner:

Look, my job is essentially just corralling more and more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action. And Charlie — his children call him a book with legs. [Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed]

Continuous learning

Eisner continues:

Maybe that’s why both men agree it’s better that they never lived in the same city, or worked in the same office. They would have wanted to talk all the time, leaving no time for the reading, which Munger describes as part of an essential continuing education program for the men who run one of the largest conglomerates in the world.

“I don’t think any other twosome in business was better at continuous learning than we were,” he says, talking in the past tense but not really meaning it. “And if we hadn’t been continuous learners, the record wouldn’t have been as good. And we were so extreme about it that we both spent the better part of our days reading, so we could learn more, which is not a common pattern in business.” [Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed]

It doesn’t work how you think it works

If you’re thinking they sit in front of a computer all day obsessing over numbers and figures? You’d be dead wrong.

“No,” says Warren. “We don’t read other people’s opinions. We want to get the facts, and then think.” And when it gets to the thinking part, for Buffett and Munger, there’s no one better to think with than their partners. “Charlie can’t encounter a problem without thinking of an answer,” posits Warren. “He has the best thirty-second mind I’ve ever seen. I’ll call him up, and within thirty seconds, he’ll grasp it. He just sees things immediately.” [Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed]

Munger sees his knowledge accumulation as an acquired, rather than natural, genius. And he’d give all the credit to the studying he does.

“Neither Warren nor I is smart enough to make the decisions with no time to think,” Munger once told a reporter. “We make actual decisions very rapidly, but that’s because we’ve spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly sitting and reading and thinking.”

How can you find time to read?

It takes time and energy to read. One way to help make that happen is to carve an hour out of your day just for yourself.

In an interview he gave for his authorized biography The Snowball, Buffett told the story:

Charlie, as a very young lawyer, was probably getting $20 an hour. He thought to himself, ‘Who’s my most valuable client?’ And he decided it was himself. So he decided to sell himself an hour each day. He did it early in the morning, working on these construction projects and real estate deals. Everybody should do this, be the client, and then work for other people, too, and sell yourself an hour a day. [The Snowball]

It’s important to think about the opportunity cost of this hour. On one hand you can check Twitter, read some online news, and reply to a few emails while pretending to finish the memo that is supposed to be the focus of your attention. On the other hand, you can dedicate the time to improving yourself. In the short term, you’re better off with the dopamine laced rush of email and Twitter while multitasking. In the long term, the investment in learning something new and improving yourself goes further.

“I have always wanted to improve what I do,” Munger comments, “even if it reduces my income in any given year. And I always set aside time so I can play my own self-amusement and improvement game.”

Reading is only part of the equation

But reading isn’t enough. Charlie Munger says, “We read a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.”

Commenting on what it means to have knowledge, in How To Read A Book, Mortimer Adler writes: “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

Can you explain what you know to someone else? Try it. Pick an idea you think you have a grasp of and write it out on a sheet of paper as if you were explaining it to someone else. (see The Feynman Technique and here, if you want to improve retention.)

Nature or nurture?

Another way to get smarter, outside of reading, is to start surround yourself with people who are not afraid to challenge your ideas.

 

Source.

A Guide to Getting a Bachelor’s Abroad

There was a time when the self-confident undergraduate took a semester or two abroad to taste an unfamiliar culture and dip a toe into the waters of higher education on a foreign shore. Today, tasting is timid stuff.

While graduate programs have long attracted international students, undergraduates are seizing upon the vast opportunities to enroll in foreign colleges for a complete bachelor’s degree. The number of options to do so is growing by the year. The online platform StudyPortals reports an estimated 5,670 English-language degrees in non-Anglophone countries. In Europe alone, 300 colleges and universities offer more than 1,500 English-taught bachelor’s degrees, according to Beyond the States, an international college adviser.

The benefits of a thoroughly international education in the age of globalization are conspicuous. But the game-changer is that college abroad can save parents tens of thousands of dollars. In many countries, including Turkey, Thailand, Brazil, Iceland and some in continental Europe, college is either free or virtually so, with tuition less than a couple thousand dollars. Many other universities offer a bachelor’s degree for under $7,000 a year.

Icing on the cake: It’s possible to obtain financial aid, both need- and merit-based, from universities outside the United States, as well as government aid from home. (The Department of Education website lists nearly 900 foreign colleges and universities where Americans can use federal financial aid.)

A bachelor’s abroad isn’t for everybody. Students must be prepared to immerse themselves in the customs of an unfamiliar habitat far from home. It’s an endeavor for the intensely curious and resourceful, those who can adapt to systems that do grading, testing and instruction quite differently. Forget intercollegiate sports, frats and clubs. Even partying is not the same — less binge drinking, for example — and campus life, when there is any, isn’t as cozy. But the rewards are great, say graduates and educators, and recognized by employers seeking go-getters.

Giovanni Hashimoto, a 23-year-old out of Washington, D.C., transferred to the University of Milan after two years at Pacific Union College in California. Though it took some digging online and follow-up emails, Mr. Hashimoto, who speaks no Italian, found what he wanted in the university’s English-language political science and economics program. With tuition at $4,000, he calculates he saves $20,000 a year studying in Italy.

But, more critically, acquaintances in Washington’s world of public policy and politics, where he wants to eventually work, told him that a foreign degree “connotes a willingness to try things outside one’s comfort zone” and would work in his favor.

Read about college options abroad in the UK, Ireland, Continental Europe, Australia, and Singapore here.