Bell Curves Blog

There are many great debates in the country today: Democrat vs Republic, Charter schools vs Public schools, Robert Frost vs E.E. Cummings, Lebron vs Kobe, McDonald’s vs Burger King … the list goes on and on. We’d like to weigh in on one of the most important debates of our time: The SAT or the ACT?

College-bound students today are having this debate in numbers that their predecessors, ancestors, and older siblings never did. In part due to the ubiquity (SAT word!) of acceptance of either test, and in part due to the growing awareness of testing options, students are now more frequently asking themselves “which one should I take?” The answers are as varied as are the answers to all of the debates mentioned above, and as passionately defended. We’re going to try to be the voice of reason and help you make the decision by providing as much information and perspective as we can. There are a lot of factors that go into making this decision, from what a particular school is looking for to what subjects the student excels in, but here’s something else to consider: fee waivers.  Or more specifically, what fee waivers do and do not include. Today’s post will help you understand this often overlooked difference and how it might help make the difference for you.

When you’ve been doing test preparation and college admissions advising as long as I have, one invariably has this conversation with bright, ambitious students or their parents.

“I scored a 2200 on my SAT.   If I take it again and get a 2300, will that ensure I get into (insert name of preferred college or university here)?”

The answer is there is no score that will ensure acceptance into a given school—

In the Bell Curves office, we hear parents and students ask this same question over and over:

“How am I going to pay for college?”

So we turned to one of our favorite college-counselor-admissions-gurus, Angela Conley, for advice on finding money to pay for college.  She offered us some good counsel in response.  Angela says:
Many high school seniors (and parents) believe that the college process is over around this time of year and everything that can be done has been: the college and scholarship applications were sent . They believe that at this stage there is nothing left to do and there are no more opportunities out there.

Admissions tests (while this post is focused on the SSAT and ISEE, it’s also applicable to the SAT and ACT) are notoriously difficult for students and confusing to parents, especially when otherwise high-performing students get “low” scores. While there are many possible reasons for a student to under-perform on a test, we’ll tackle some of the most common. Hopefully this will give you some insight into how to help your child succeed on a standardized admission tests. Here are a few reasons students struggle with admissions tests:

Earlier this year we joined SAT aficionados and college counselors on Twitter for the bi-weekly #CampusChat. The topic was SAT vocabulary and it sparked a zany hour of interesting words being used in fun context. By our estimation the prize for most interesting use of SAT vocab was taken by Suzanne Schaeffer (mostly because of her fun digs at Bell Curves founder @akilbello). If you’re interested you can see the full twitter transcript here.

This chat got the juices flowing over in BC central and sparked us to ask our teachers for recommendations for short-term (less than 6 months) and longer term vocab acquisition tools and tricks. In this blog we’ll address some of the long term vocabulary strategies that parents can use to help their children develop college-ready vocabularies.

Students often complain that their college counselors didn’t help them- or at least not as much as they would have liked! However, students and parents must acknowledge how involved their counselors’ jobs are. Before cursing their counselor, families should read on and be reminded of these facts about counselors:

We’ve had many questions over the years about SAT score reporting policies and more recently the Score Choice policies. Hopefully this will shed some light on these policies and help make the testing and application process a little less of a mystery.

This is your last chance; after this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. - Morpheus to Neo from The Matrix

When people say “test prep,” what they mean varies greatly, and it’s usually limited to what they did themselves or what they’ve heard of. As part of this blog, we hope to provide a bit more insight into some of the options for test preparation. Our team has blogged quite a bit about free prep resources (check out our two most popular post on test prep here and here), so it’s high time we devote a little space to the commercial products.

The following post is from Lawrence Watkins’ blog. It’s very insightful.

Last week, CNN aired a special entitled “Black in America – Part 2″ profiling the lives of different African-Americans all around the nation. I watched with anticipation as the CNN crew was profiling an organization in which I am affiliated, Management Leadership for Tomorrow. MLT is a program that helps aspiring minority business school applicants attain their dream of attending a top notch business school. Out of all the underrepresented minorities at Cornell’s business school, well over half went through the rigorous MLT program.

Today, I received this disturbing inquiry from one of our non-profit partners and wanted to post the question to help and inform other NPOs, individuals, or organizations who might find themselves in a similar situation. I’ve changed all names to ensure the anonymity of the student and organization.

I am working with an 18 year old young woman who had graduated high school but was unable to attend college this past fall. She was accepted into St. Curves College but had to withdraw from classes because her mother refused to provide financial information