Our strategy-
DS took the PSAT last Spring and 9th grade spring and in 8th grade. His score has gone up around 100 points each time with no prep. He did 10 hrs of free College Board math peer tutoring and improved immensely on those practice session tests. He took the digital psat test a few weeks ago but it crashed on the last question so we will never know his score, but he said it seemed a lot easier than last psat. Then he took the SAT last weekend. He will take the PSAT this fall and I will see if he wants to do the ACT this fall. Also maybe the paper SAT one more time, or he may prefer the digital. I’d like him to have it all out of the way because he will be applying for service academies and academy summer programs as well as NROTC scholarship which all starts in January.
Will they superscore across text formats?
That will be up to the individual colleges. My guess is most will, but that’s just a guess.
FWIW, the test prep expert interviewed on Your College Bound Kid this week believes that schools currently superscoring will do so across formats as needed.
I would hope so.
Wow. Your kid sure got a lot of chances to try the PSAT with 10th and 9th and 8th. Our school district only offers it once. October of 11th grade.
No wonder some kids do so much better than others.
Ours gives it 10th and 11th. I think the improvement you see year to year have less to do with prep and more so with material covered in class. My kids were just starting Algebra 2 in October of 10th grade and definitely ran into some concepts that were not hard but they were just not familiar with.
My son had Geom in 8th and Alg 2 in 9th – so by the time he sees the test for the first time in 11th, he’ll have forgotten most of it, replaced by calculus…
He will be familiar with the concepts. Doing a couple of practice tests is all he needs.
They offer it every Spring starting with the PSAT 8/9 and it is now open to 8th graders. But when he was in 8th it was only open to kids in the gifted program.
We have kind of relied on these practice tests for prep. Neither of my kids has done prep on their own.
Both had pre-calc in 10th grade. My daughter is great at math, but my son definitely needed Algebra review. I can’t wait to see how much the college board peer tutor math class helped. He felt much more confident on this SAT than the spring PSAT.
Our school also offers the psat starting in middle school. 7th grade gifted students, then 8th for everybody.
It really helps the kids get used to it so they’re not scared of a “big test”.
That’s a pretty common situation. My son (and older siblings) had the exact same sequence. He spend very little time reminding himself of a few of the concepts a week or so before the test and did well enough for National Merit. He said it wasn’t a big deal.
Well, here’s hoping my kid can do the same, and the state cutoff isn’t pushed even higher by kids who got to take the test in 8th, 9th, and 10th grade since their school offered it.
Good luck.
There’s no difference between those kids taking it prior years and your kid doing a couple practice tests (which are usually former actual tests) if you’re concerned about it. Arguably practice tests not taken years apart from the test that counts would be more effective than the vague experience of years before.
Let’s talk about National Honor Society (NHS). My D24 just got a letter inviting her to apply. This isn’t a surprise to us. What is a bit of a surprise is the seemingly low threshold to get invited. At our school it is apparently a 3.4 GPA. I’m not sure if that is weighted or not weighted. That seems low to me. Is that the standard for all schools?
About 100 out of 225 seniors make it into NHS in our school. Guidance counselor told me once that colleges aren’t impressed by NHS because they know some schools can let in large percentages. That may or may not be true everywhere but I can’t imagine a school being super impressed with my kid if she’s part of the top 44%
Don’t get me wrong I’m proud and all but the stage was ridiculously crowded for the last ceremony I went to!
I agree. It doesn’t seem so special to be inducted at our school at the moment.
Ours is probably top 25-35%. I think it is a product of the rampant grade inflation going on.
Not at all. Our school has a minimum of 3.9 gpa unweighted… a certain number of volunteer hours every year, and 4 activities for 2 consecutive years only one can be a sport. The activities and volunteer requirements have kept former valedictorians from being in NHS (or anyone with one or two extremely time consuming activities).
Ours is 3.75 UW and an additional 20hrs of volunteer hours over the school required 20hrs.