<p>R2R said: “Actually Kei…I think the whole concept of whether a college in which you are interested will super score not tertiary at all! It may make the difference between your kid deciding to take the SAT again (and again) or not…and if choosing to take it again, whether he or she needs to focus on preparing better for a particular section or all sections again…”</p>
<p>Good point . . my “tertiary” comment was meant to be about the kind of info that a college counselor would discuss at an intial meeting with a parent/child combo about colleges. </p>
<p>Given that that the college counselor at our local public school has to work with about 200 kids whose parents come from many backgrounds, I would expect they would be concentrating primarily on matches of kids with schools, and secondarily on SAT prep and maintaining good grades. </p>
<p>You have quite a sophisticated understanding of the college process, finely grained enough to know that multiple SAT sessions may be important for some schools . . . and that comes after things like being well prepped for the SAT.</p>
<p>That said . . thanks for your insights! I have a friend who is obsessing about college for her sophomore daughter, and I can’t wait to give her one more thing to worry about :-)</p>
<p>Our public high school is large, diverse, undrefunded and understaffed, but we are lucky to have one guidance counselor who is a gem. I’m going to link to the departmental website she created and maintains because it’s an example of what one dedicated and hardworking GC can accomplish, and its contents may even be helpful to some here: [url=<a href=“http://www.westhillweb.com/academics/guidance/index.htm]Guidance”>http://www.westhillweb.com/academics/guidance/index.htm]Guidance</a> Homepage<a href=“I%20believe%20this%20%20link%20does%20not%20break%20CC%20rules,%20since%20it%20is%20an%20%22authoritative%22%20site,%20but%20if%20I%20have%20overstepped%20any%20bounds,%20I’m%20sorry.”>/url</a></p>
<p>^MommaJ–someone went through a lot of trouble! I wonder how many people read the page. Our GCs put a monthly scholarship bulletin on their website, but I wonder how many kids click on the site.</p>
<p>ReadyToRoll, with all due respect, I think that CC is too test-obsessed and that the whole super-score issue is rather trivial. Yes, it seems like a big thing when your kid is going through the process, but I doubt it makes a dimes worth of difference in college admissions in 99% of the cases. The times when it does might be if a particular score (or score combination) is related to a hard cutoff for admissions or scholarship eligibility at a particular school, or if the student is has a particularly lopsided testing profile. </p>
<p>But most colleges do not make admissions decisions based on minor score differentials – and if a score or more sections of the ACT or SAT is weak enough to be a potential problem with admissions, the student is going to want to retake. </p>
<p>In other words – the reason the counselor wasn’t prepared for your “superscore” question is that in the real world of college admissions, it seldom matters, as much as CC regulars may obsess over the details. Also, I am not sure whether the phrase “super score” is standard terminology used by college counselors, or just part of the CC lexicon, like “adcom”. Finally, it is quite possible that different people use similar phrases to mean different things, and what you perceived as ignorance was merely the college counselor trying to clarify what you meant when using an ambiguous phrase. </p>
<p>You seem overly focused on stats. From your own account, it seems like you were simply looking for information that confirms whatever it is you think you know. If you truly were looking for “new information” I think you might have asked some different questions. Since I don’t know you or your kid’s profile, I don’t know what those questions might be – but asking for specific statistics or facts that can easily be determined from other sources is pretty much a waste of everyone’s time.</p>
<p>My ds’s college counselor visit was similar. My Ds would say no schools in a certain area(LA) or small (less than 2k)and she would only reccommend schools in LA or small schools that were less than 2K. We definitely felt she was not listening to him and only recommending the same schools that she recommends to everyone else. Our son asked about summer programs and the ones she recommended already had their deadlines passed. The final straw for us occurred when she would send an email to all parents about visits from colleges coming to our town. We would have the originial postcard from the school and see that the date and time were different from her email. After calling the schools, I realized that she kept on getting dates confused and was passing out incorrect info about the visits.</p>
<p>Since our visit with her was so depressing and our ds’s friend was telling us how much she enjoyed her private counselor, we decided to follow suit and hire a private college counselor. I love our private counselor, she has made the whole experience much more manageable and has considerally reduced the stress in our household. Since my ds was getting started late in the game compared to her other junior clients, he meets with her twice a week. We get very detailed emails about what they accomplished and what my ds still has to do. It’s definitely a team effort for we as parents will get assignments. Our ds has repeatedly told us how much he feels in control with using the private counselor. He lugs the crate around that she prepared for him and keeps it updated. Since our son is extremely stubborn, we felt it was best to go the private route but I think a parent could do the same thing with a cooperate child. Our counselor knew of superscoring.</p>
<p>ReadytoRoll- reading your last post, which clarifies the nature of that college counselor and your question, I would say don’t waste your money on a private counselor. You can help your s with this yourself with all the info here on CC.
But as I said before, try to see the main GCs rec letter before it’s sent, at the very least to check for errors.</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard, the goal for college counseling at D’s school is to get each kid into their “first choice school.” That seems to mean spending more time managing the kid’s choices and expectations and less time strategizing how to maximize the kid’s stats I think they feel their job is to work with what they have, not improve the product, so to speak. That leaves the “are these SATs good enough” conundrum up to us, not her.</p>
<p>Your best counselor will be found on CC. There is more knowledge and information here than you will ever find from a college counselor or guidance counselor. You just have to be willing to put the time in to read and ask. My experiences with D’s GC were horrendous. We’re talking a small private school (35 in a graduating class). She looked at me like I had two heads when I was upset the ACT scores were automatically put on the transcript even though I specifically sent a letter asking them not to be and did not sign a release for the scores. The letter of recommendation for the val was cut and pasted and she got the his name wrong! After many emails and phone calls it was clear she did not have as much info as I did from this board and I decided to just do this all on my own with my D. She was more than happy to have one less kid to worry about. (I guess 35 was hard?) But I did make up a book with all the wonderful info from CC and gave it to the principal hoping he might share it with other parents who needed help. The GC did want to know after it was all finished about acceptances and merit money. I felt like she wanted to take credit for it and I refused to submit it. She was furious I told her it was none of her business. The reality is that no one will care or know as much about your kid as you do. Unfortunately there’s a fine line between being involved and knowledgeable and making yourself INSANE thoughout this whole process. I’m self medicating when it all starts again with S in 2 years. It really all does work out in the end. Good Luck.</p>
<p>Second, my husband found out about a “prestigious” college counselor not too far from us and insisted we go. What a waste of time and money. For this particular office if your child is interested in anything other than top schools with undecided or “standard” majors they have no idea and did little to educate themselves. My daughter wanted musical theatre and, given her grades, they were very unhappy and constantly tried to steer her away from that. We needed to find the various schools that were best and did find much of our information from CC and friends in the business. They were a bit helpful for many of her essays which was good but anything outside of the “elitist” box was disdainful for them. </p>
<p>No one knows your child and your family situation better than you so their help is limited in that respect. I believe a private counselor is best at lessening the arguments at home as they can put the pressure on your child to get forms in on time, rewrite essays, etc. so you don’t have to. Other than that, I don’t have much use for them which is what my husband learned in the end.</p>
<p>Oh - and you should have seen the arguments going back and forth when she was discussing turning down Yale (which she eventually did) - he was livid! Made my day!</p>
<p>Our society as a whole just does not care about education or see a benefit fro it. It values sports and entertainment – simply look at the salary differences. We have gotten what we have paid for.</p>
<p>Hey guys? If you have a minute would you look at my “math issue” thread? The question is for my d’s friend and we have a horrible counselor so your advice would be appreciated.</p>
<p>amtc - a super score is taking the best single score from each time you took the SAT. Say you took the SAT three times with scores:</p>
<p>CR - 700, 640, 690</p>
<p>Math - 650, 720, 740</p>
<p>Taking the first CR score of 700 and the third Math score of 740 gives you the super score which is 10 points more than what your third sitting score is.</p>
<p>Some colleges will let you use super scores, but most I’ve seen won’t. Each college should state on their site which scores they consider.</p>
<p>As related to the OP, about 5-6 years ago my company (large pharmaceutical) had a ‘college counselor’ do a lunchtime seminar. At that point, my s was at a service academy and my d was researching schools (I had not yet found CC). I decided to go to see if I could learn something. What a waste of time! She didn’t know half of what I already knew from my own research, and when I asked a question for clarity she had no idea what I was talking about. I could have taught the class myself and given much more info to the attendees, and the company PAID her to come in and teach it. </p>
<p>So for me, the bottom line is what others here have stated, that you are your child’s best advocate. You can find all this stuff out yourself by research, and now that everything’s online (which it wasn’t when my s was applying) it’s pretty easy to do that. I don’t believe that ‘college counselors’ are worth the money unless things have changed a lot in the last few years. Both of my kids are out of school now and successful, and both went to their dream schools.</p>
<p>Ha. I would consider the original poster’s guidance counselor pretty knowledgeable.</p>
<p>My D’s counselor called her in one day, said that she had looked up Davidson College (which was on my daughter’s list) and really didn’t think it would be a safety. “Dickinson”, my daughter replied, “Dickinson College”.</p>
<p>Nobody from my daughter’s school had ever attended Swarthmore and I’m pretty sure that the guidance office hadn’t heard of it. My daughter must have started a fad because now another student from her high school is at Swarthmore.</p>
<p>To answer the question, yes, I think College Confidential, some key books like the Gatekeeper, and a willingness to do some research can help a parent become a very effective college counselor for their kids. A lot depends on the relationship with your kids. Some kids simply aren’t going to listen to a parent and some parents simply aren’t going to listen to their kid.</p>
<p>Our family “team” really clicked when mom, dad, and daughter ALL read The Gatekeepers and had the same lightbulb of understanding about the process go on over our collective heads at the same time. In retrospect, I don’t think we did a great job on the safety end of the application list, but the overall list of two reaches (one with a double-legacy) and six matches (75th percentile scores) was pretty good, I think. We never got to test the list, but I would have been surprised by many rejections and I feel even more strongly as I have learned more. It’s all about the application. If anything, we probably underestimated the application, but we really tried to bring an attitude of cold realism to the assessment. Pie in the sky is not a helpful approach to building a college list.</p>
<p>One other piece of advice. Don’t get hung up too much on Naviance plots using only SAT scores. The real trick here is to be able to make a qualitative assessment of your kid’s complete application. For a lot of schools, it’s not really about the SAT scores because all the applicants all have good ones.</p>
<p>Your comments about the useless advisor provided by your company as an “employee perk” are doubly helpful–not only to be skeptical of the value of college counselors, but how typical it is that a corporate HR department would hire a speaker without testing whether that speaker would add any value.</p>
<p>I think RTR raised a valuable topic. I am sympathetic to the idea that a GC with hundreds of students to mind cannot be an expert on hundreds of schools. I think much of that gap could be closed, however, by GCs taking the much easier step of actively surveying their graduates for opinions about their colleges. Just knowing what the average graduate of your high school thought about the quality of teaching, the quantity of work and quality of social and extracurricular options would save parents enormous amounts of time and worry.</p>
Interesting every college my older son applied to say they superscore and I think that all the potential schools on my younger son’s list do as well.</p>
<p>Thanks again for the thread. We met with our son’s college adviser yesterday and I was prepared. She made a couple of errors and I handled it in stride. Might have been rude to her if I wasn’t ready.</p>
<p>Our large public high school has one college counselor for a student body of over 3000 kids, and she is relatively new to the job. She knows the basics but is definitely not up to speed on many of nuances involved in the college admissions process. </p>
<p>Some parents, like me, who have experience “in the trenches” of the college application process suggested to the counselor that we could help out by pairing up experienced “parent mentors” with parents who were new to the process. She thanked us politely and then never pursued the matter. </p>
<p>Later in the year, some parents on the PTSA list serv suggested that we create a “College Admissions” list serv, which would be a collaboration between parents and the College Counseling Office. The counselor again rebuffed the gesture and expressed concern that parents’ responses to questions posted on the list serv might be “misinformed.” We created the list serv anyway, without the cooperation or participation of the College Counseling Office, and it has generated some very interesting and well-informed discussions. As is true on CC, the wisdom of the masses prevails, and any posting that is inaccurate is quickly corrected by someone with better information.</p>