Oh we will (ok, I will but wife is kind of holding back 
). I have gone to my junior and senior proms, so I really want S24 to experience it. However, wife has never gone to a prom. Therefore, all she knows about prom was from movies… 
Anyway, we had a talk and once he is hired for the PT job, he will be using some of the money to pay for it.
Just spent a week in Argentina helping my mom with some health concerns. I think I have mentioned before that she is completely out of touch with reality about college admissions these days. A few things she has said “tell him to put his grandparents address in CA and he will qualify for in-state”, he needs to apply to HYP, etc., etc. So I really tried to avoid any discussion of college related stuff while I was there. It of course came up anyway. I mentioned the schools he is thinking about. She quickly said “but he is also going to apply to HYP, right?” I said "no Mom, he has zero desire for any ivy, nor would he get in. He will be lucky to get into half the schools on his list. She then says “of course he will get in, he is handsome and nice”.
She was dead serious. I started cracking up and said “OK Mom, I will be sure to have him include in his essay that he is handsome and nice so they accept him”. 
I know I am week late to the post 3/11 SAT discussion since I was out of the country when S24 took it. He said it was “horrendous” and that he will be shocked if he scores any better than his PSAT (which was indeed horrendous). ACT is 4/15- hoping that goes a bit better.
D24 got a survey from College Board asking about her SAT experience on 3/11.
My MIL has similarly sage advice for D24 as your mom does for your son. My MIL has said stuff like, “But I thought that because she goes to School X, she’ll get into whatever college she wants.” Um…that’s not how it works.
It’s Sunday evening, so had another 15-min ‘let’s talk college stuff’ sit down w/D24. We skipped last week because we were in NM for the UNM tour. Stuff that came up this evening:
Sorry, kiddo…but yeah, you will be getting a summer job.
A couple of things I thought about asking the senior counselor tomorrow:
For #4, D24 is a very humble person. Doesn’t brag. Focuses a lot on finding common ground w/other students. At the same time, a lot of her classmates at school are hypervigilant/hyperfocused on getting straight A’s all the time…and honestly, D24 just doesn’t have straight A’s. As a result, she doesn’t see herself as remarkable, unique, etc. She’s quiet and reserved…and then once she feels at ease w/you, then she opens up and will talk your ear off.
The college essays are going to be hard for her because she has a hard time with being introspective and explaining how she thinks to somebody else. She also gets really bad writer’s block in this area, too. I’m hoping that the college counseling class next year will help with this.
I think these two things alone are wonderful traits. Trying to finds common ground with others means she understands being part of a community and what that entails. She can pull in specifics about the schools she likes and how that community would be a great place for her to find commonalities with others. I am very similar in terms of being introverted and quiet until I feel at ease and then I am happy to talk all day. I feel like it allows me time to really listen to people and get a sense of who they are and not waste time on random small talk. This will be valuable in the healthcare field in terms of patients feeling safe/comfortable and feeling like they were “heard”. I am a nurse practitioner and there really is a benefit to being able to sit and listen to people and not jumping right in just to “talk”.
I will have to ask him if he got the same survey. I wonder if “it totally sucked” is one of the answer options 
After much eye rolling, she filled out the survey and one of the questions asked if she’d be willing to be contacted further to talk about her test experience with College Board people. I made her answer yes because the test taking on 3/11 was truly an ordeal. They absolutely needed more proctors.
Met for 30 min w/senior college counselor at school today. Here’s the highlights/info I got in case it’s helpful:
Other random notes:
The counselor sounds awesome. I wish my S24’s counselor is the same. Can I bring him over to your daughter’s school for a free session? 
I definitely could have used a counselor like that! My (average public HS) counselor moved from grade to grade with our class – we had him for four years. But then we got to Senior year and he hadn’t done Seniors before. So when he came into our all-Seniors History class to talk about things we needed to know for applying to college, ever so often he would look for a nod from me if he wasn’t sure about something… he knew I had been researching it all for the past three years.
I wish all students had better access to counselors. It’s so frustrating with the counselor-to-student ratios these days!
D24 doesn’t know yet about the odds of getting in to U of A’s honors college. She’s going to be disappointed…for awhile, has been hoping to be roommates with a HS classmate. The U of A honors dorm rooms are super nice…the other dorms are just ok in my opinion. And pretty much the only traditional dining hall on campus at U of A is the honors dorm dining hall.
…so in my opinion from my mom perspective, I think all that will result in the school’s desirability going down.
I think that UNM will end up moving up in her emotional priority list. At the info session before the tour last week, they said that they had a lot of OOS students (I don’t remember the exact %…40%?). Almost all the dorms are in the same area of campus and campus police has a substation right there in the middle of all the dorms. And you can walk to UNM’s hospital from the dorms’ complex (a plus since she wants to do pre-health stuff).
Gonna add UAH (Univ of Alabama-Huntsville) to the list as well but I don’t think she’ll end up going there because of its distance from home. All of UAH’s dorms basically have single rooms, so you never share a bedroom with your suitemates. D24 will like that a lot, but DH will be able to convince her to go closer to home. Plus, getting to/from home is more difficult from Huntsville.
Looked up UNLV again but honestly, Las Vegas is so ugly and D24 does not like Las Vegas…and they only have a WUE scholarship which she’d be eligible for…which makes the tuition more expensive than the AZ and NM options.
Attended an online lunchtime coffee talk that the school principal did. Later in April, school is doing an all day (on a Saturday) ACT test prep class for $125. Of course, that’s a week after D24 is taking the ACT for instance #2…ACT test #1 is today (all of the 11th graders are taking it today).
This is helpful for us to know. S24 has been talking about retaking the ACT, but I’m not sure that would be a good use of his time and energy. His score is already good enough for his likely schools, and I don’t think he could improve enough to send it to his reaches, especially if it needs to be above the 50%. Where he has room for improvement is math, which is his least favorite subject. It seems like he would be better off putting that time into his classes, or his junior counselor job this summer.
Wow, that sounds like a great and productive meeting. I wish the counselor we met with was half as informed as yours.
I am a little UGH at the thought that scores below 1500 should not be submitted. 
What I have consistently heard from admissions officers is that, “scores should be submitted if they add to your overall application package.“ So, if your scores are above the 50th percentile of the school’s scores from the year before, it will definitely add to your application. There are still plenty of schools where scores lower than 1500 meet that requirement!
There could be some other situations where a score lower than the 50th percentile might add to your application, but those are probably not super common. (For instance, my kids are homeschooled, so I feel like good scores even if they are not at the 50th percentile are valuable for verifying that their grades are not bogus. If my kid has a 1400, and the 50th percentile is 1450, I am still probably going to submit his scores because I think it bolsters & verifies the rest of his application package.)
One thing that I have been noticing, and it is totally anecdotal because I don’t have extensive data and I’m not sure that anyone ever will, is that it feels like the results this year indicate that students are more likely to be deferred, waitlisted, or rejected if they did not submit test scores. I know when we talked to admission officers in the fall for my S 23 they were adamant that not having test scores would not be a negative for students, and they said things like “those students who don’t submit test scores will receive full consideration just like all other students.” However, reading through the results threads for moderately selective and selective schools, it seems like students who were test optional were more likely to not get admission, even when they have the same GPA/rigor profile as students who did submit to test scores.
I guess one way we might be able to get this information is by looking at the CDS for this year‘s admissions, but that won’t come out for at least 12 months for most schools. The CDS tells what percentage of the students in the freshman class (so only those who actually chose to attend, not all those who are admitted) did submit SAT scores. If that number is above 50%, or has gone up from the year before, I think that could be an indication that schools are relying on SAT scores and give a bit of a boost to an application that has them.
I know admissions officers want to at least say that test optional doesn’t matter because it gets more applications in their hands, and that not only looks good for them, but gives them more options on who they admit. If there is a student who for whatever reason they really want to admit (they really need a piccolo playing student who will join the club volleyball team!), they would rather not have to justify that acceptance if the student has an SAT score 200 points below the class average. If the student is TO it makes it easier for them.
Anyway, my point is that if your child has a “good“ SAT score, it might be best for them to submit it even if they’re not above the 50th percentile but are close. Is an admissions officer really going to say, the student is 10 points below our 50th percentile, so they are completely the same as another student who did not submit test scores? I guess maybe, Northeastern has implied that that is the case for them. But I can’t help but think that admissions officers assume somebody who doesn’t submit test scores has on average significantly lower test scores than the average. If the school’s 50th percentile is 1450 and you have a 1200, test optional seems to make sense. If you have a 1440 I would think you would want to submit it unless you hear something specifically to the contrary.
I was speaking with a college admissions person in an airport and they admitted that test optional does carry a negative implication — even for schools who absolutely try to avoid. This person told me it’s just human nature that if you have a great application but no score reported you naturally question validity of other academic elements on application. He also said also that some application readers are turned off by students who seem to avoid SAT/ACT stress and preparation activities. He was honest that some question the true commitment of the student. As an example, he pointed to all the increased applications to top schools who allow test optional and said students who know they don’t fit traditional academic achievement models are trying to slide in to a school they previously would not have applied.
Back in my day (not too long after the Pleistocene 
), one just showed up for the tests and took them cold (PSAT/ACT/SAT). Granted, Kaplan and Princeton Review did have some books and in-person courses, but that was for those who were either forced to do it by their parents or were needing to sufficiently raise their score on the low end (i.e. may have been trying to meet the threshold to attend the state flagship or reach a scholarship threshold). But since there was a lot less transparency about thresholds for a scholarship, most people I knew just went with whatever their score was. There wasn’t the striving for the highest possible score to get into a highly rejective college.
The fact that an admissions officer would question why a student doesn’t want to be doing extensive prep for a test is a bit unsettling to me. Of course, my kid would have a test score, whether it was a 16, 26, or 36 ACT score. Only with the 16 would we probably go test optional. The other scores would just be indicators as to the college list DC should apply to.
I’m curious what kind of school that admissions person worked at. I would not want my kids at a college where their academic achievements are called into question because they choose not to submit scores. Our public high school is in the top 50 in NY State. The colleges on S24’s list will be familiar with the type of school and the level of rigor. I don’t see why they would ignore his record of four years of learning for any reason.
I also don’t think the parents on this thread have students who “are trying to slide into” top schools where they (apparently) don’t belong. I disagree with the idea that “students who know they don’t fit traditional academic achievement models” are somehow trying to deceive by not submitting scores. If traditional academic achievement must include high scores on one marathon standardized test, then @#$ traditional academic achievement.
S24 knows that he doesn’t learn in standardized, textbook ways due to dyslexia. He’s figured out how to succeed anyway in a sea of neurotypical overachievers and excellent rote memorizers. If I were an admissions officer, I would figure that his determination, curiosity, and willingness to reach out for help will serve him very well in college.
About half of S24’s college list went test optional in the 1990s. His favorite school went test optional in 2010, and fewer than 20% of applicants submitted standardized test scores last year. Their acceptance rate is near 40%, so about half of their accepted students did not submit scores. At his second favorite school, only 26% of enrolled students submitted a score last year. I think this is fairly typical for the colleges targeted by families on this thread.
A table of colleges that went test optional, from 1970 to 2016: