Any info would be great - we started the info gathering early. My daughter is currently in 7th and we will apply next year. She will also stay on the EHS campus this summer for a few days and train with Coach Boyle at the camp and at the Mid Atlantic tournament in July.
First, Coach Boyum is fantastic and will undoubtedly build an incredible program. This season has been a little rough, with a shockingly unlucky run of injuries and illnesses. But the program is definitely moving in the right direction with lots of young talent and more coming in.
There are conference rules about how much the whole team can fully practice in the off season, but there is lots of opportunity for smaller workouts with coaches and outside resources.
Assuming you aren’t local (we aren’t), there are a few different options for club teams. Some girls just keep playing for their team at home, meet them at tournaments and practice with them when schedules allow. Some latch on to a dc based team. Several girls play for Capitol teams, but they are very strict about making every practice and tournament, which requires a significant commitment for the player and the parents. St. James Stars actually practices on EHS campus, and several girls play for them. Several more practice with them, but play in tournaments for their club teams at home. My daughter does this, and it’s worked out great. Stacey Williams works for stars, and is also the registrar at EHS, and is very helpful in addition to Coach Boyum.
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That is great to know about local club teams practicing on campus (especially Stars). I agree that Coach Boyum seems to be moving the program in the right direction.
We are out of state as well, so access to a local club team is a huge benefit.
I have a question about interpreting SAT/ACT averages at selective boarding schools. These schools are obviously very strong academically and extremely competitive for admission, but the reported average scores are lower than I would have expected.
Is that because boarding schools are selecting for a broader residential community—academics plus athletics, arts, leadership, geography, personality/fit, and other factors—rather than purely test-score strength? Or is it more that the publicly available score data can be incomplete or inconsistent?
Would appreciate any perspective from people who understand boarding school admissions well.
That has always been my take on this (unless talking about the VERY top BSs).. would be curious about others…
If you look at day schools with weak sports, they tend to have VERY high averages…I also noted many have stopped publishing or started only publishing scores of those that submit to colleges– tricky.
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I think it is mostly this, although it is worth knowing that relative test-taking ability can shift over time. Kids develop at different paces, the subject matter on these tests is learnable, and in fact test-taking can be learnable. And if some kids are gaining relatively, necessarily others are slipping a bit.
I also think sometimes people just don’t really understand what certain SAT scores actually mean. Like, there is a gap between percentiles among SAT takers and estimated percentiles among all HS students, as reflected here, say:
So you can look up whatever averages you are seeing, but I don’t always find them all that surprising personally.
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We had a discussion with AOs at a Ten Schools event, and I was surprised to hear that ISEE/SSAT scores were not a huge differentiator in admissions. It was refreshing to hear and makes sense to look at students more holistically when building an actual boarding community.
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My take is that each child/application is different. In some cases, the AO will know the middle school where that person comes from, and their grades can be a good indicator that the person can handle the academic rigor. For some people, it’s the opposite: their grades weren’t that good, but their ISEE/SSAT can help show they can handle the coursework. Each child’s narrative will likely be unique, and how the standardized tests factor into their application will reflect that.
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There are a lot of other data points that can give them similar info on a student 's readiness for their academics.
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I’m going to copy and paste this for every kid who asks “I got 94th percentile on my SSAT. Should I take it again? I really want to go to Exeter.”
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100%, and I think @wildboarX2 has a good take on this as well that they mentioned upthread. I know we are going to take the advice of the AOs and not stress about testing at all.
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Yeah, I like the concept of a “reasonable best”, where you do a reasonable amount of preparation/practice so you are comfortable with the format, scoring, pace, and so on, and have addressed any simple subject matter gaps. If nothing else, I think applying knowing you have done your reasonable best is comforting. If your version of that process means taking the test a couple times, and that isn’t a big burden for you, then OK.
But then once you have done your reasonable best, it really isn’t worth worrying too much about exactly where you rank. And you definitely should neither talk yourself out of applying to schools where you feel like you are in fact academically well-prepared and would be a good fit simply because you see other kids applying with higher test scores, nor assume a very high test score means you don’t need to apply to a reasonable range of schools.
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We recently toured Andover and Exeter. People told us we would know immediately which one would be a good fit for our kid, but we liked both and didn’t notice any meaningful difference. I understand that Exeter is more discussion-based in the classrooms (we were not able to sit in on a class) than Andover, but wonder if we are missing something or if this is just based on old rivalries/folklore. Does anyone have direct knowledge? We also visited St. Paul’s and Lawrenceville. Both amazing places and much easier to see differences in fit there.
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I think you “know” after you attend admitted students days. At least that was the case for our family, with different schools.
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Some kids and families don’t quickly, or ever, form strong preferences between some schools. If you like them both, this is not inherently a problem.
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