I agree, to a point. It is great to have someone ride herd over the process, especially someone integrated into the school. It is nice to hear someone say “kiddo reminds me of the kids who have gone to ________ University”. And hearing someone affirming what we think are matches and reaches is good validation, especially someone who knows the kids behind the dots on the school’s Naviance scatterplots.
The standardized testing timing - it is nice to get a sense of how good of a test taker your kid is in 10th (via psat), but now that the subject tests are a thing of the past, there is a lot less to worry about. I was fretting about the timing last year, but there is plenty of time. I am now glad that kiddo didn’t have to do test prep until the second half of junior year, banged out the exam right after (took it twice about 6 weeks apart), and now he is done. The whole process just took a few months and didn’t ruin any summers.