Parents of the HS Class of 2024

Mine did it last year and it was not pretty. Taking it again tomorrow. I am very curious to see if he improves. Initially I thought his school only did it in 10th grade and even complained about that here, but I was wrong. It is 10th and 11th grade.

Is 1340 on PSAT good for 9th grader?

No, itā€™s awful. Iā€™d would have been embarrassed if my child had scored only in the 98th percentile in 9th grade. Truly shameful.

ETA: clearly itā€™s an excellent score, congrats to your child.

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Yes! Our state (MA) isnā€™t quite as bad as some (NJ!) but the selection index cutoff is SO high. I was a NMF from OK in the 90s, and S23 (who is generally a testing wiz) had a score about what mine was but was only commended.

What really surprised me though was that S24 took it last year and was only a couple points behind S23, and that was because he hadnā€™t learned all the math yet. He actually had a higher Eng score! So he will take it again this year, but as you said, he would basically have to have a perfect score for NMF so I wonā€™t hold my breath.

That is amazing

So S had an 1150 on the psat last year, got a 1530 on the sat with not intensive prep, I think 10th grade English and most importantly math makes a huge difference

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After students take the PSAT, colleges will start purchasing lists from the College Board. If your student used their hs email to register for the PSAT, they can go to the College Board website and edit their account and change email addresses. The deluge of emails from colleges starts off small but, by this time next year, your studentā€™s in-box will be filled with so much college spam that will be overwhelming. Take a peek at the comments on the Parents of HS Class of 2023 thread.

My suggestion:
Create a new email address for College Board and/or ACT. Make it something clean and simple (ex. Bob.Smith @ gmail). Use that email to register for college tours, to request info from colleges, etc.

Create a separate email address (ex. Bob_Smith @ gmail) that your student only uses on college applications. Emails sent to that address are important as the only entities that have it are the schools your student sent an application to. Information about setting up college portals, admissions decisions, housing, open houses, scholarships, etc. will be send to that email and wonā€™t get lost in the masses of marketing emails that are sent to the college email account.

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Ours is Saturday too - I think that is par for the course in MA (I think I recall you are from MA as well).

What is not intensive prep? Iā€™m trying to figure out how to guide my son ā€“ he hasnā€™t done any prep at all but decided (out of the blue) to take a timed practice SAT last night while watching football - he got a 1450 which is pretty good (especially under the circumstances) but I know heā€™d like to do better on the official test and Iā€™m not sure how he should prep. S22 went TO and just used Khan Academy so I donā€™t have any experience to draw on . . .

Yes to this! For S22 wqe did a new email for college board but wished we had a different one for applications. Iā€™d put tours and anything we initiated in that one too. Going through the one for important stuff was a huge pain.

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That is great! He met with a math and english tutor once a week for about 8 weeks before the test and took maybe 2 practice tests. The math teacher went over the few problems he didnt know and the english one gave some grammar rules. I dont think that he actually found any of it necessary, it was more moral support. A 1450 with nothing is pretty good, I bet if he went over the few math problems he didnt know how to do and got someone to go over grammar rules that they are looking for he would be well into the 1500 range.
and we are in NJ

I must be getting the states mixed up! In any case, good luck to your son on Saturday. I donā€™t think mine is taking it too seriously but since the cutoff in MA is so high itā€™s extremely unlikely heā€™d be in NMS range in any case so . . .

here too, he keeps saying he is going to look at it, and then moves on to something elseā€¦

My daughterā€™s HS had offered after-school prep classes, which were mostly common sense and test strategy, but she still felt they were informative and time well spent.

Then she went to the local Barnes & Nobles and sat down in the aisle with all the different SAT prep books and took a good half hour to get a sense which one ā€œspokeā€ to her (in her case, it was the Princeton one).

Then, she broke the huge book into chapters and made herself a calendar with deadlines, by when she wanted to be done with each chapter - in time for the ā€œbig dayā€. That basically gave her a weekly ā€œpensumā€ to stay ā€œon trackā€.

So she did her own ā€œlow keyā€ prepping over time and it worked out well enough.

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I donā€™t think we have any school based offerings here but worth checking out. Just trying to decide between self study (with books or Khan academy) or getting a tutor for him (not sure he will need that).

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all about motivation and time management. My S definitely didnt need the tutors and could have practiced on his own, he never would have done it. If your S has time and motivation to do it then there are tons of free real SATs on the /SAT subreddit and lots of recommendations for great books, many recommend the Meltzer books.

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He is sporadically motivated so weā€™ll have to see!

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that was exactly what happened with my son.

same with our school

same here our school is on Saturday