College Admissions Counseling

Albright College, a private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, has announced that they are going test optional beginning with students applying for admission in 2009. Like other colleges that have gone test optional, Albright’s stated reason is that they have found little correlation between test scores and first year grades or graduation rates.
For a complete [...]

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The College Board and ACT have jointly announced new concordance tables for their respective exams. For those of you not familiar with concordance tables, it is a way to approximate a score on one test with a score on the other test.
You will note that there are actually two concordance tables, one for comparing the [...]

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The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the College Board, the administrator of the SAT, will once again allow students to decide which SAT scores to submit to colleges.  This new policy will go into effect for the class of 2010. This policy previously existed under the name of score choice and was eliminated by [...]

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“The results (of the new SAT validity study)  show that the changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how well the test predicts first-year college performance.”  That is a quote from a new report from the College Board addressing a “large-scale national validity study of the SAT”.
As previously reported,  the new writing section [...]

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Community colleges are a great choice for many students who either are interested in a technical type program or who want to save some money the first two years of college. But there are some little known problems that can occur with those students wishing to transfer to a four year college after a community [...]

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A new study out of Chicago reinforces what I have suggested in the past and that is that spending too much time preparing to take the ACT is not beneficial. The study found, in part, that studying to much was not beneficial because it took time away from studying the broad content knowledge that [...]

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Wake Forest University has announced that they are going test optional beginning with the freshman class of 2009. While I have reported on a number of liberal arts colleges that have recently gone test optional, this news is important because Wake Forest is the highest ranked national university to adopt a test optional admissions standard. [...]

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I am sometimes asked if students need to take both the SAT and ACT and the quick answer is no. A student only needs to take one standardized test for college admissions. The question then becomes, which test.
All students should take at least one practice test of the SAT and ACT. The College Board and [...]

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Smith College has announced that they are going test optional beginning with the class entering in 2009. International students will continue to need to submit standardized tests, SAT I, ACT, TOEFL or IELTS as appropriate.
Smith, the largest women’s college in the United States, is currently ranked number 17 in the US News rankings of top [...]

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As many of you know, the College Board changed the SAT in 2005 to add a writing section to the required test. There have been many criticisms of the new writing test since that time and many colleges either don’t consider it or give it limited consideration. Several new studies, however, indicate that the writing [...]

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