Good grades, terrible PSAT

Because of my son’s LD, he will never do well on standardized tests. However, his grades are A’s and B’s, and he typically carries an average of about 87% at a private school. What are your suggestions for applying to colleges, other than looking for ones that are SAT optional? Will they bypass him immediately once they see his SAT/ACT scores, or will they bother to read his application to see why they scores are so low?

Is he in 10th or 11th grade? I assume his private school will work with him to identify schools that Are an appropriate match for his profile?

He’s in 10th. The school will definitely work with him on this - they have great college counselors. I just wanted to see what others thought and what their experiences were.

Would he qualify for extra time to take standardized tests and would that make a difference? Students with documented learning disabilities can petition for extra time to complete SAT/ACT.

He had several accommodations during the PSAT, including taking the test in a private room and extra time. Didn’t help at all.

I don’t know what kind of learning disabilities your son has, but I’d suggest having him try the ACT at least once. My son has ADD and a hand tremor and some other relatively minor issues. His PSAT score was far from great, but he did well on the ACT. Without any prep, he got a 31 the first time and a 33 the second time.

However, even if yours doesn’t do well on it, there are a lot of decent schools that accept lowish scores. It seems that ACT and SAT scores are a big factor in determining scholarships though.

Last, my son doesn’t like being pulled out for testing. We tried it once in elementary school, and he was very distracted by the other kids who also got pulled out. He said that most of them had various issues and didn’t follow the “rules” about noise, etc like the majority of the kids do.

Get him in dual enrollment, he will get more credits than AP. The PSAT is regulated by the CollegeBoard, and they want more kids to stay in AP so they can make more $$ (those greedy b-stards).

What is dual enrollment?