Agree with @Groundwork2022 , sometimes you need to bite the bullet and hire a professional on an hourly basis. We hired a college admissions professional for D20 and made a big difference in her understanding the things she should be doing for college admissions.
I also would hire a test prep professional to work with her on a weekly basis. The good ones are worth their weight in gold. I have not had to ask once for D to study for the ACT and she has regular “assignments”.
It is money well spent and takes some of the burden off of us parents. I knows all kids are different but this approach has worked really well for us as D has seen a 4 point increase in ACT score in 6 weeks.
My kids did 2 hours of test prep A WEEK starting around now. 1-2 hours a day is nuts. Can’t blame the kid for ignoring it. You need to get your H to back off. He’ll destroy his relationship with her and still not get what he wants if he keeps it up.
It seems to me that she might be rebelling, possibly because you and your husband are dictating your expectations instead of working together on a plan she’s invested in. I think I’d take a step back and have a heart to heart with her about what she’s hoping to gain from her college experience. You need to be supportive of her goals and aspirations, while helping her understand what it would likely take to get there.
What constitutes a healthy balance between school work, ECs, family, friends, and down time is different from kid to kid. Some thrive on pressure while others shut down. You know your daughter better than any of us. I suggest you work together to devise an ACT test strategy that she feels good about.
I am curious why she thinks she needs a 33 or 34? Most kids can raise their act score a point or two but it is pretty difficult to raise it 7 or 8 points. She is certainly testing college ready. It might be time better spent starting to look at the college options and using the test prep money to go on some visits.
She is not “rebelling” to be annoying. She is probably scared.
With all this emphasis and emotion in the home about test scores and college admissions, she probably fears falling short of her parents’ expectations for her and losing your esteem.
What you probably want for her, at the end of all this, is for her to be a happy and successfully independent adult. Keep the long view.
Making her a wreck about the test not only can potentially damage her long term self-esteem and relationship with the two of you, but it can be counterproductive in its goal. First, who can perform well on a test when the emotional stakes are so high, with so much anxiety? Second, her schoolwork/grades are more important (ask any admissions officer!), and her extracurriculars are important, too. She needs to spend most of her time on those, as well as some time on test prep.
For now, try listening more and talking less. How is she feeling? What does SHE think is the plan that will be most productive for her, to balance her schoolwork, extracurriculars, test prep, and friendships and fun?
Too soon, she will be out of the home. Enjoy every precious minute of your time with her, and make home a loving sanctuary, not a battleground. Try to do fun things together. Listen to her joys, her hopes, her fears. If she feels “heard,” not only will it help her develop her thinking and decision making skills for life, it also will make her more likely to keep you a big part of her life and talk to you often in the years to come.
It is not common actually for a student, after a month or 2 of prep to go 200 points on a SAT. In fact, I think recently I saw that Princeton Review had some sort of guarantee on their prep classes, and I certainly see quite a few kids get scores 150-200 points higher after going to one of the many prep centers in our area. 200 points is equivalent to going from a 27 to a 33.
Right now, focus on the upcoming holidays and whatever she’s doing - track meet, holiday concert, photography, etc.
Don’t talk about test prep till Spring.
In one of your posts, you wrote, “We were hoping for Somewhere like Cornell, Binghamton or Stonybrook.” Is that you and dad “we” or your Dd telling you that is her goal “we”?
One of the hardest things to do as parents is shifting gears from parenting young children to parenting young adults. Your Dd is heading toward adulthood and needs to start taking ownership over her own life choices. We can tell our older children our opinion, but ultimately they will make their own decisions. Respecting that those choices are not a reflection on us as parents but dependent on them as individual persons can be hard. Life has its own way of delivering natural consequences, and sometimes the best way to preserve parental/child relationships is to let the natural consequences do the teaching.
Fwiw, we have a large family with kids with very different personalities. We have had kids who couldn’t wait to leave for college and have loved every minute of it. But, our current 11th grader is pretty adamant about not wanting to leave for college. We sent her to 3 different summer college camps this past summer hoping to spark some enthusiasm for going away to college. It didn’t happen. She enjoyed the camps, but her very firm position is that she wants to live at home and commute. She has not yet taken the SAT or ACT. She did not want to take the PSAT. We can encourage her, but it is her choice. She is our 6th (so we are not new to this stage of parenting), and she is the first who has wanted to live at home while pursuing a degree. If she changes her mind down the road, she can always transfer.
College is just a small part of life. Different paths. Different choices. They dont have to be mini versions of our perceived goals for them. They should be given the opportunity to figure out their own path even if it isn’t the one we hoped they would take.
Also, Bing, Stony Brook, Geneseo, Buffalo and Albany DO NOT require a 33. A 30 will do nicely, even for honors college.
(SUNYs have specialties and unique programs. VERY broadly,Buff= engineering, Stony Brook = stem/commuter, Bing/Geneseo= business+ arts& sciences residential, Albany = business - but dig deeper as they each have unique, high level programs. For instance, tiny Alfred has Ceramics, a high demand engineering specialty.)
I shared your comments with dad. We are going to give her some space, readjust our expectations and try to get some counseling going. We are going to work on letting her drive the process. Thank you so much. I think it helps to get other opinions to see things from different perspectives.
So glad to see your response in post#53, @holychild!
I have a 28-year-old daughter who is now one of my best friends. Sometimes, when I look back at her high school years, all I see are the mistakes I made: my focus on her grades and ACT scores, my worry over her college choices, my internal struggle with “loving the kid on the couch.” She was a good high school student but I always thought she could do better - she was the queen of the B++.
In my defense, I usually kept all my craziness to myself - but now I see that those HS years were precious and that I wasted so much of that time in arguments over stuff that really. doesn’t. matter. I wish I could have a big do-over of her junior year!
Kid one improved his SAT score by over 250 points after taking a prep course. This was in 2002…and he had almost 1400 on his retake.
Kid two took exactly the same prep course (2005)…and her score didn’t improve one point. Yes, the company said she could retake their course for free…but what was the point in that? She wasn’t going to take the SAT a third time. Her final score was 1240, and she got accepted to her top choice school and three others. She only applied to 5 places.
I would think that the other kids in school are not in “college mode”.
She can always go to communit college.
During spring break, take her on some college tours. Even if she doesn’t have ideas what she wants, take her to your State U, a state college, and a LAC.
At that point tell her you have a budget, but are going to support her in what she wants, be it community college, State U or any place she can get a scholarship to that is within budget.
Once she starts seeing her options and hears what other kids are doing, she very well may get more interested in the process.
One of my kids had a huge increase on the SAT from one year to the next with no prep…it was just because he had completed another year of math and had taken a very intense IB English course which helped a lot with the CR section.
If the ACT isn’t her test, try the SAT (and vice versa, for anyone else reading along).
Most importantly, she needs to drive this train. You’re not going to be at college supervising her studying and life choices. By junior year of HS, she needs to be managing the workload, ECs and other life skills (laundry, chores, social activities) on her own. It’s not just about getting into a good college – it’s about preparation for managing one’s own life.
Another thought – these tests also mark the beginning of the process of launching into adulthood – a concept that scares the %$#@ out of many 16-17 year olds, even as they also excited about the prospect.
Hope it all works out well. And enjoy just hanging out together without worrying about college all the time! We ended up with designated “college discussion free zones”. Maybe something to consider!
Has anyone pointed out that a 27 is well above the national average? Not everyone is a 30+ score taker!
Are her friends doing professional prep work yet? Possibly your D will feel motivated when her peers start talking about scores, prep, etc. And touring a nice range of colleges based on her current scores might help with perspective - either you’ll see there are plenty of options, or she will realize she needs to get scores up to be competitive.