<p>^ Fair point. YMMV. Mine retained information very well and didn’t have to worry much about keeping the material “fresh,” but did have considerable stress in May and June with all of the other demands on his time including AP, finals, and time-intensive ECs. Adding an intensive Saturday morning test to his load at that time would have been worse than putting the test off until after summer.</p>
<p>My S who will be a college Freshman in the fall took his SAT’s 4 times in his Jr. year. Our school principal once told me they should take them as many times as offered since their scores go up each time. He was right, they went up each time. By June of his Jr. year he had completed his SAT’s and when school started in September we were able to start the application process without worrying about waiting for scores. This worked out very well, because many of the schools he applied to had early deadlines for their scholarship programs.</p>
<p>sorry I meant to say a rising senior…oops…that’s how overwhelmed I am!</p>
<p>Well, my daughter is on a 3 weeks musical theatre program at Ithaca College, she comes back in July 18, then she needs to focus in math. She will take the SAT for a 4th time and the ACT for the first time. I hope that what she has left from the summer is enough for her to stress on the math. She has never done good in math in school, always had to tutor for her classes. I am praying that she does better!</p>
<p>Goaliedad, our school just got naviance and I don’t expect it to be much as the overwhelming majority of kids just go to directional state schools. If they do shoot high, it tends to be Northwestern because it’s the closest top school. I expect our search to ne a lot more far ranging geographically than the kids around here.</p>
<p>I wonder why a school sending its top students to publics invests in naviance? Oh, well…</p>
<p>I can understand your environment. Same mentality here where we live. I have a nephew who went to a small private in your neck of the woods and will be going to Northwestern next fall. He did look at and was accepted a few schools on either coast, but chose the close to home alternative. And this is a kid who has traveled the world.</p>
<p>Goaliegirl OTOH, doesn’t want a thing to do with the publics where we live. Of course, being in boarding school in the northeast has given her both a broader perspective (we’ve also lived in 2 midwestern states as well) and has a healthy dose of privates both in NE and in the Midwest on her list. There are a couple of publics, but her list is driven by the overlap of 2 things she wants to do in college. Fortunately, her list is pretty much all match/safety by her metrics. Not that I have anything against reach schools, but when you are looking to do 2 significant time investments outside of academics, reach schools are not a good idea.</p>
<p>I take it that the Pizzakids don’t have specifics about their academic or ECs that limit their school choices or make a certain place a draw?</p>
<p>Wouldn’t UChicago be just as close as Northwestern?</p>
<p>Yes, U of Chicago is just as close, but that’s not the point. Northwestern is more known among these parents as “the good school.” it’s not on their radar screen as much. </p>
<p>Disclaimer: I’m an NU alum and of course I think extremely highly of Chicago. I am commenting on the two schools’ relative visibility among Chicago area parents who aren’t particularly into academics. I am NOT commenting on school quality. </p>
<p>Anyway, NU is too obvious of a choice, is my point. I want my kids to have a world wider than the state of Illinois, and I just don’t think Naviance will be a huge help, as it’s both so new and because I expect my kids to look off the beaten path.</p>
<p>I’m exaggerating a bit - there were 2 kids to Penn and 1 to WashU this year- but I feel I’m going to have to drive this, and use CC as a resource that the school won’t be.</p>
<p>OK, I’ll throw out another suggestion…</p>
<p>Given that you don’t have Naviance fully implemented (with a track record), you might want to see if guidance will give you a list of the admitted schools of the student in last year’s 5th to 15th percentile (IIRC yours are right around the 10th percentile).</p>
<p>Now granted, a lot of them will have UIUC, but a certain number will have other types of schools (LACs et. al.). I’d take this list and look at the stats for the schools in question and look for peer schools to these schools - perhaps using USNR to find schools similarly ranked. </p>
<p>I don’t know how big the graduating class is (200, 300, 400, 500?), but 10 percent of 400 students (a fairly typical suburban HS) is 40 student and with an average of 2 or 3 admissions per student should yield about 100 admissions. Not all of them are UIUC or Northwestern. You should be able to find functional equivalents (further from home) of the other schools on this list.</p>
<p>I take it that the kids at Penn and WashU were in the top 5% and therefore are not considered peers for yours.</p>
<p>If it makes you feel any better, our initial touring included schools well above and well below the match category. I think we learned something at each and every campus we visited - and we’ve been to more than 2 dozen campuses. We still have more than a half dozen still to visit, as goaliegirl’s interests have refocused since the initial rounds of visits. However all the experiences of previous visits have made it very easy for her to evaluate schools now.</p>
<p>What I am saying here is even if you can’t get a level of confidence that the schools you are visiting are likely candidates, just the very act of visiting and deconstructing what is liked/disliked about the schools goes a long way to help them when the “real” candidates emerge.</p>
<p>I don’t know if your kids have spent much time back east or out west, but if you decide to take a swing in either direction and the kids decide that they don’t like the directness of easterners or the overly relaxed attitude of westerners (stereotyping here of course), it will be knowledge that will help. You’d rather learn that now than during senior year and have to scramble for more schools to fill in after their October visits are disasters.</p>
<p>BTW, I haven’t taken the test, but I am probably also a J type. I don’t like surprises on major things (job relocations, travel, schools). With goaliegirl, I query her interests and research all the possibilities, trying to have all the possible alternatives covered to some extent before she asks the probing questions. The most critical thing I try to wait for her to ask before volunteering any gathered intelligence.</p>
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<p>YES. That’s an extremely helpful piece of information to me, goaliedad. That helps me feel better about the visits we’re thinking about – that it’s the act of visiting, not whether this particular school is reach / match / safety / well below. Thank you very much.</p>
<p>Do other parents agree / disagree with this?</p>
<p>I agree completely with the idea that visits just prior to the beginning of junior year can go a long way towards identifying the TYPE of school a student is interested in. Clearly, the final list will be better massaged with respect to likely/target/reach categories after test scores are in, but to begin to finalize that list the student needs to know what they are looking for beyond whether that school will accept them. As for testing, all of my kids applied ED or EA. Their test schedule looked like this:</p>
<p>SAT Subject Tests: Bio (9th grade- 2 of them); World History (10th grade - 1); US History (11th grade - all 3) Writing (in the old days January 11th grade -2) and Lit( January 11th grade- 2). They all took APs in May of junior and senior year since our HS doesn’t offer any until junior year.</p>
<p>SAT - All took it first in the March/April sitting junior year, then repeated it in June.</p>
<p>My kids really wanted all standardized testing done before senior year and for them it worked out. Many students I know take it one last time (usually a 3rd time) in October of senior year. For some reason, many seem to do better on that administration regardless of the amount of additional prep they do.</p>
<p>To me, it is better to start planning earlier because the interlocking puzzle pieces fall into place easier. Example: If you have a feel for which colleges you may be looking at now, you can chart out all their varying entrance requirements, such as: a SAT II in math or science and a SAT II in humanities or Social Studies. Then you can make a game plan, based on your child’s classes, and abilities, which SAT II tests he would do best in, and which month he should best take these tests. You have time to pick a test date that will work. If the SAT II scores are going to be crucial to your game plan (look at your college’s merit scholarships, for example), I would strongly recommend investing in the Barron’s book for whichever SAT II’s you are looking at. Have your kid take a practice test, and look at the type of questions he got wrong. You may find that there are “holes” in the HS preparation your child received (like “vectors” or “thermals”), and this gives your child time to do a little self-study to fill those in. It also gives you more time, as a parent, to study old threads on CC for tips.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, my kids and I started hanging around at local colleges when they started middle school. We’d go over to the U to use the library or go to the bookstore for a book I wanted; we stop at a local college to use the computers when we were traveling… I never said “let’s look at this college” but they did get lots of exposure. In fact, my son decided he wanted to go to MIT and work in the Media Lab when he was 12 when his uncle took him there to visit with a friend–and he did end up doing exactly that when he went to college.</p>
<p>My daughter did a ten-colleges-in-five-days bus tour Feb of junior year with her high school class (private school) in which an effort was made to see a wide variety of kinds of different schools–LACs, private big sports schools, Stanford, etc. She came back from the trip very clear about what kind of college she wanted to attend, even though only one of the schools ended up on her “check again” list. That let me create a list of colleges that I thought matched her desires, and we did a more specific east coast college tour in April of her junior year. </p>
<p>As for the SAT/PSAT issue, the SAT definitely has a practice effect–most students’ scores improve between their first try and their second. Studying and taking a practice test really do make a difference. (Both my kids scored well enough on the first high school try (they took it in middle school for CTY) that they didn’t take it again.)</p>
<p>Pizzagirl,
A caveat about this statement:
“Anyway, NU is too obvious of a choice, is my point. I want my kids to have a world wider than the state of Illinois”
70% of students going off to college end up within 500 miles of home, and it’s not just because they only apply to local schools, in part it’s because by May of their Sr year, it’s dawns on many that a huge change in their life is coming and they decide they would rather be closer to home then farther away during this next phase in their lives. When my S [ and I, 'cause I too was “driving this process”] first started to think about where he should apply to college, he was SURE he wanted to be as FAR away from Calif as possible- East coast here we come![ He also had done more traveling to more places in the world than I had, so getting on a plane was no big deal] By the time decision time rolled around, and despite the fact that he had applied and been accepted at 12 colleges all further than 2000 miles away, he decided, as Dorothy did in the Wizard of Oz, that there’s no place like home" [or closer to it- in Los Angeles]
So as much as you want your kids to go outside of Ill, in the end, they may want to be closer to home. You will need to remember to let it be their decision.</p>
<p>I totally hear you, menloparkmom – NU is really a double edged sword for us. Both H and I are NU alumni (him undergrad, me undergrad and grad) and we loved NU. Our kids are familiar with the campus and both have studied at CTD (NU’s version of the Johns Hopkins CTY). In fact, S is there this summer. </p>
<p>Because of that, there is a real danger that H and I could go way too “rah rah Northwestern” on them, and then set them up for disappointment if they are not NU caliber (or even if they are NU caliber, if they don’t get in). Plus, it’s so close, and my kids would personally benefit from seeing other parts of the country, IMO.</p>
<p>But I don’t disagree that it’s their call ultimately! We just have to be careful that if they express interest in NU, it’s fully driven by them, not out of pleasing mom and dad, if that makes sense.</p>
<p>^^ that totally makes sense.</p>
<p>I can understand your situation.</p>
<p>It sounds like you are fighting the familiar favorite on more than one front. It is very smart to make sure they don’t get too comfortable with NU to the extent that they shut out other alternatives. </p>
<p>And perhaps with their familiarity with NU much of any discussion surrounding any campus visit is how it compares with the “known quantity”. It isn’t important whether it is a fair or not, it is the reality. </p>
<p>And how they view NU will very much color their opinions as to how a college should be.</p>
<p>This all makes me feel better about our plan to go see UIUC, DePaul / U of Chicago, and some teeny-tiny colleges in teeny-tiny Illinois towns because the objective is really see what you think of this type of atmosphere, right? And give them practice in looking what to look for?</p>
<p>S will groove on that, I am sure. He’s really into ambience and he’s going to be a big “fit” kind of person. D not so much, I don’t think. She even said to me, “Shouldn’t I go for the best academics? What do I care what the surroundings are like?” H and I tried to talk her out of that by saying that you’ll be living there for 4 years and it’s important that the surroundings are pleasant to you (not to say that there’s only one perfect fit at all, but there’s a qualitative difference between a small town college and a college that is right in the heart of the big city, even if academics and student-body caliber are 100% equal). I’d love some more advice on how to get that through to her. I’m afraid she’s more (gasp) prestige driven, LOL.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, maybe your daughter really means it, and the academics are her primary criterion. Doesn’t sound like prestige, sounds like she wants a challenge. On the other hand, you probably know her well enough to know whether she hates cold weather, loves big football crowds, etc.</p>
<p>With regards to your daughter, I think that you also need to find a way to demonstrate the professor access differences between a large research university and a LAC. While it is impressive that your distinguished professor has this wonderful research project going, the fact that s/he only has 5 office hours per week to share with x-hundred other students and for the most part you deal with grad students may have an impact on your educational experience.</p>
<p>Now granted, that is not how all research universities work (many do involve their undergraduates), I think there is something to be demonstrated by being able to walk to the professor’s house in a small town for an informal event.</p>
<p>I think that this is something that LACs have a difficult time demonstrating to touring prospective students, although you can often get face time with faculty during tours at some LACs (appointment necessary) - enough to get the point across that accessability is there.</p>