Departmental Scholarships...

SimpleLife
Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:40:01 +0000

^hi again, newjersey. Are you asking about stats for the departmental scholarships? My son doesn’t really want his stats posted, but they are extremely high. Really, really high.

He applied to ten schools. A lot, I know. The main reason: long story, but I can sum it up with “finances.” Four of his schools have yet to release their decisions.

I don’t know that I am at all qualified to make a recommendation to anybody else regarding test preparation, lol! I have no specific wisdom about that, but I can tell you about what my kids did.

None of them ever took an SAT or ACT course. You know those College Board “questions of the day” or whatever they’re called that they send you via email? One of my sons kept all those emails and then reviewed several a night for about 3 weeks before he took his SAT. My other kids didn’t do that. All my kids got an SAT study guide and did the SAT practice tests, using a kitchen timer and conducting them as though they were the real thing. I don’t know how many tests are in the study guide, but they each did all of them – maybe 3 or 4? They each started on a Sunday, about 3-4 weeks before their real test. They gave themselves a timed practice test, scored themselves, found their weak areas, and studied those weak areas from the study guide. Then, a week later, they took another timed practice test, scored, found weak areas, and studied their weak areas from the study guide. They repeated the whole process until all the tests in the book were done, timing the first of the tests so that they could do them weekly and the last practice test would occur the weekend before the real SAT.

All of my kids also took the ACT. They each took just one practice test to prepare for it, just so they could become familiar with the format of the test. They figured that they’d know what they know at that point, seeing as they each already had the SAT under their belt.

None of my kids took any test more than once. One SAT. One ACT. One PSAT.

They each had very good results with this method. But I would credit a lot of their test success to their excellent public school education (it was truly excellent – we’re lucky) and the fact that they’re big readers. In other words, their daily lives were kind of their test prep.

I think I answered all your questions, newjersey. Good luck to your son and your daughter!! Sounds like you’re doing a great job with them! :)