Yes, Virginia, believe it or not, there are actually more standardized tests beyond the normal ACT and SAT requirements at most schools. There are...SAT Subject Tests! (Cue creepy music)

Now, this isn't actually anything to be worried about. It's just another one of those annoyances of the current admissions system as it is. Here is something really important to note:

You may not have to take these exams.

Some schools require it as part of their admissions process either as simply part of admissions or for placement. It really depends on where you are applying. I have found a link to a new resource - it's not comprehensive by any means, but it allows you to look at schools at a glance and see if Subject Tests are required.

These tests are NOT like the SAT or ACT. The SAT Subject Tests actually test what you know. The SAT US History is about US History. Here's an example of an easy question:

President Truman's foreign policy after the Second World War had as its expressed aim:

A) preventative war
B) atomic proliferation
C) liberation of peoples under communist rule
D) massive retaliation against Soviet aggression
E) containment of international communism

If you're really curious about the answer, email or call us for the answer and we will tell you. :) (And if you're in AP and don't know the answer, well, you're in trouble) :(

The next question is, which tests should I take? Well, generally school require a variety. You can't take the SAT Biology, Physics, and Chemistry and satisfy your 3 test requirement. You have to take the tests in different disciplines. The most commonly taken grouping by my juniors is: Math Level I or II, US History, and Literature. Let me walk you through the reasons for those choices:

1. Math Level I or II will depend on where your student is in Math. Someone just finishing stats or algebra II is best suited for Level I. Anyone in Precalc or above should focus on Level II.

2. US History. Almost every junior in the country takes US History. This test is straightforward and geared right towards that curriculum.

3. Literature. Among the remaining choices, it is the most accessible. It's a harder version of the reading comprehension one sees on the SAT Reasoning Test and the AP English tests. For those disinclined towards Literature there are other choices...

Your other choices:

1. Languages - anywhere from Chinese to French to Hebrew, these tests are routinely taken by native speakers as an "easy A." Hence, average scores on these tests are around 710-730 (out of 800). Unless your child has spent at least 4 weeks continuously speaking this language, you should pass on taking this test.

2. Sciences - anyone in any AP science should take these (Bio, Chem, Physics) as they will be easy material for anyone in AP level courses. If you have an A or B in a standard level course, some review would be good as this is the equivalent of taking a full year's final, and your coursework in the second half of the year will focus on the 2nd semester.

3. World History - for the occasional Sophomore who is taking AP Euro or World.

Now that you know what tests you might take, the logical question is when.

There are three answers:

1. May of Junior Year. This is the best choice for AP students. They routinely finish their course load in early May so that they are ready for the test. Teachers vary in what they do for the last month. Some, like my AP US history teacher, let us watch movies for the rest of the time as reward for our hard work (we had 15 5s, 10 4s, and 3 3s. No one got less than a 3, we were a hard working class!). Some, not content with a full year of college level work, ask for a paper or a project during that last month. Either way, come June, the material will not be as fresh as it was in the beginning of May. For AP students, May is absolutely the best choice because the subject test is only one hour and it will either be the week of or the week before their actual AP exams. It serves as a great warmup.  Even if this is near Finals week for you, this isn't a big deal because this, unlike Finals, is not a test you have to study for if you've been studying for APs.  It's like "AP Jr," you might say.

2. June of Junior Year. This is the best choice for normal/honors students. Unlike AP students, regular CP (college placement) or HP (honors placement) classes end with the school year, so June is the best date for these tests.

3. October of Senior Year. This is for people, frankly, who missed the May and June test dates for sports, because they were taking an SAT Reasoning test, or (most often) because of carelessness. You can do some study over the summer by yourself or with a private tutor and take it, hoping to retain as much as you can about a subject you stopped attending classes for 4 months ago. This is, by far, the last resort option.

We have students from all over the Metro and I am well aware that some schools prefer certain dates to be used for certain exams. I can only offer my advice based on the snapshot of the 1,200 or so students we have worked with over the past 5 years. Every child's situation is different so you need to pick an exam date based on your needs, availability, and preparation.

Here are our schedules for classes which run in April for the May tests. If you are taking the test in June and you want to put together a custom class for your child and a few friends, just give us a call and we'd be happy to set it up. We are also running clinics for AP Calculus (both AB and BC).

All our classes run 6 hours across 4 dates (90 minutes each time) and have one practice exam before the real test.

We are in the doldrums, right before Spring Break, and I thought that some articles ruminating on the prevalence of grade inflation might be helpful.

As with many issues in academia, there is no one right answer, however, I thought that the following group of articles might help a bit.

Just Because the Grades Are Up, Are Princeton Students Smarter?

A Letter to the Editor in Response

Is it Grade Inflation, or Are Students Just Smarter?

Enjoy, and try to stay warm. :-)

Here is a NY Times article on why the decision by Harvard and some other schools to end early admission really did not, as some thought, make admissions less competitive, but rather more.

Now that those highly driven, super competitive kids are out of a special pool that gets decided on early, they are part of the general pool and hence rachet up expecatations for everyone else.

I've also included a response to the article from the Provost of Stanford.

As always, my comments are in italics.

As a postscript, in 2007, 93% of Get Smarter Prep students got into the college of their choice (top three) because we set appropriate expectations and raised scores to give them the extra edge to beat out other applicants.

The New York Times
Published: January 17, 2008

Applications to selective colleges and universities are reaching new heights this year, promising another season of high rejection rates and dashed hopes for many more students. Harvard said Wednesday that it had received a record number of applicants — 27,278 — for its next freshman class, a 19 percent increase over last year. Other campuses reporting double-digit increases included the University of Chicago (18 percent), Amherst College (17 percent), Northwestern University (14 percent) and Dartmouth (10 percent).

Officials said the trend was a result of demographics, aggressive recruiting, the ease of online applications and more students applying to ever more colleges as a safety net. The swelling population of 18-year-olds is not supposed to peak until 2009, when the largest group of high school seniors in the nation’s history, 3.2 million, are to graduate. The rise in applications at three universities — Harvard, Princeton and the University of Virginia — came about as they ended early admissions policies, which had allowed students to receive decisions by mid-December, months ahead of others.

The universities said early admissions benefited more affluent and sophisticated students and required students to commit without being able to compare financial aid offerings from various colleges.

The application figures suggested that the end of early admissions did not hurt. Princeton received a record 20,118 applicants, up 6 percent. The University of Virginia received 18,776 applications, a 4 percent increase. Like other campuses, Virginia said its final count was likely to increase slightly, because applications were still trickling in.

Scott White, the director of guidance at Montclair High School in New Jersey, said the school’s college counselors found students tenser than ever.

“There is a pure level of panic and frenzy like they’ve never seen before,” Mr. White said Wednesday. “There are some people who say that with some schools having ended early admissions, the frenzy must be subsiding. I don’t think that’s so.”

Even at colleges, there was surprise over the surges, in part because they followed strong gains in previous years.

“These are amazing numbers,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, speaking of his university’s flood of applications.

He said Harvard’s announcement in December that it was sharply increasing financial aid even for families earning up to $180,000 probably spurred applications, but, he said, the rise was visible even before that.

He said that the elimination of early admissions encouraged more interest, too, and that joint information sessions by Harvard, Princeton and the University of Virginia drew “astonishing crowds. ”

The reasons for the swelling numbers — not all colleges have reported yet — go beyond the growth in the college age population and the preoccupation with name-brand schools. Recruiting by elite colleges among low- and middle-income students and in new regions are bringing in more applications.

California, for example, has become a bigger source of applicants for Cornell since the upstate New York university created a West Coast regional office in Los Angele several years ago.

“Ten years ago, California was not among our top eight feeder states,” said Doris Davis, an associate provost at Cornell. “Now it is among our top five.” Cornell applications rose 8 percent.

At the University of Chicago, international applicants grew 23 percent, to 1,826, and early admissions applicants rose 46 percent, to 4,430, Theodore A. O’Neill, dean of admissions, said.

Janet Rapelye, dean of admission at Princeton, attributed some growth to outreach “to more students from many backgrounds, including lower socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Some of the application increases undoubtedly come, too, from students applying to ever more colleges, in hopes of increasing their chances.

“There was a time when kids applied to three or four schools, then to six or seven schools, and now, 10 or more is not uncommon,” said John Maguire, a higher education consultant.

Mary Beth Fry, director of college counseling at the Savannah Country Day School, a private school in Savannah, Ga., said she had held the average number of college applications at her school to five last year, but expected the number to climb this year because students were so nervous.

Michael E. Mills, associate provost at Northwestern University in Illinois, said the 14 percent growth this year had sent the number of applications to more than 25,000. To help it winnow the field, he said, it hired a new admissions dean, Christopher Watson, from Princeton, who was accustomed to rejecting many good applicants.

“We anticipated having to go down the path of having to make more difficult choices,” Mr. Mills said, adding that Mr. Watson helped with “making very fine distinctions among very similar applicants.”

“Applications to Colleges Are Breaking Records” (news article, Jan. 17) suggests several possible reasons for the increase, but does not recognize the contribution to these numbers of the canceled early admission programs.

In 2006, Harvard, Princeton and Virginia collectively admitted 2,500 students who applied to their early admission programs. These students submitted one application rather than the 8 to 10 applications common among high-aspiring high school students.

With these early admission programs gone, we can expect between 20,000 and 25,000 new applications flooding admissions offices of colleges and universities around the country.

No wonder there is a level of “panic and frenzy like they’ve never seen before,” according to the guidance counselor quoted in the article.

Ending early admission programs increases the level of frenzy in the application process; it does not decrease it.

John Etchemendy
Provost, Stanford University
Stanford, Calif., Jan. 17, 2008

This was the essay I wrote when I took the test (as I do every year, unfortunately :-( ) last October. It received a 12 out of 12 and illustrates again that this is not about writing a good essay, but about writing an essay that "looks good". Here is the essay I wrote in 2006.

ESSAY PROMPT Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment: A person does not simply "receive" his or her identity. Identity is much more than the name or features one is born with. True identity is something people must create for themselves by making choices that are significant and that require a courageous commitment in the face of challenges. Identity means having ideas and values that one lives by. Adapted from Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action.

ASSIGNMENT: Is identity something people are born with or given, or is it something people create for themselves? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

While identity may start as something inherent, without an individual's own interplay with, and participation in his or her own environment, a true and full identity cannot be obtained. Identity is more than one's personality, clothing, or changing moods - indeed it is how we are remembered, both in this life and after we die. In the examples of Abraham Lincoln, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, and Paris Hilton, I will show this to be true.

Abraham Lincoln will forever be remembered as one of America's greatest Presidents. however, he came from very humble beginnings. He was poor, walked to school, and taught himself through reading books. What Lincoln did, ostensibly, was to use these aspects of his life as strengths. Being poor perhaps helped him empathize with the plight of the slaves, and while he resisted Emancipation for some time, when he did do it he probably knew in at least in small part what that must have felt like. Finally, we would perhaps never have the gift that is the Gettysburg Address had Lincoln not read great oratory in those times he taught himself.

James Joyce's famous semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man traces the life of a young Irish boy from his earliest beginnings in grammar school to his first years as a writer. It is clear to any reader of the book that the main character, Stephen Dedalus, starts the novel by living a "certain way" because of how he was raised. But, as the novel progresses, for better or for worse, Stephen decidedly goes his own way. For him, identity was much more than something your parents "gave" you - it was what occurred when what was given met what was received (individual encounters with the world). So

Lincoln took a proactive approach to his identity, as did Joyce's Dedalus, but perhaps no person has had their "search for identity" more broadly and clearly broadcast than the hotel heiress Paris Hilton. Always known by the moniker "famous for being famous", she has taken what was essentially a reputation for being rich and parlayed it out into nearly everything imaginable. She has recorded a CD, starred in a movie, been in a TV show that ran for more than one season, debuted a perfume...the list goes on and on, rather like this test, though at least her endeavors have a point. Paris has seized the initiative to carve her own identity.

In the essay above I have demonstrated that identity is much more than something simply "given" to us. In accepting the responsibility of carving our own identity, we accept the responsibility of "giving" back.