<p>I am currently a freshman in high school, and I’m wondering if I’m on track to make it to a good college.</p>
<p>Here is my freshman schedule:</p>
<p>English 1 Honors
Algebra 2 Honors
World History Honors
Biology Honors
Spanish 1
SRC (health class required to graduate)
P.E./Cross Country</p>
<p>I’m in Mock Trial, Speech and Debate, Science Olympiad, and Key Club. I aspire to gain (a) leadership position(s) in upcoming years. Also, I do community service for my city’s youth commission.</p>
<p>As for college admission tests, I’m studying real hard for the SAT. The highest score I have ever received on a practice test was a 1960 (I really need to work on my critical reading -_-).</p>
<p>It is hard to tell without any actual grades, but your schedule looks appropriate and your ECs look like they will be solid if you excel in at least a couple of them. </p>
<p>Regarding the SAT, the good news is that you still have time to prep for the CR the good old fashioned way – read A LOT. Start making yourself read for pleasure for at least 30 minutes a day (shoot for an hour in the summer). Do that for the next two years, and your vocabulary and comprehension will naturally increase. And in a way that is sustainable when you get to college, too. You can read non-fiction, fiction, etc. I don’t think reading trashy stuff is helpful (mostly because the vocabulary and logic are low level, so don’t help you). But you don’t need to read the most difficult classics, either. Did you get a recommended reading list from your school? Or look at some of the links from here for ideas:</p>
<p>[Recommended</a> Reading | American Library Association](<a href=“http://www.ala.org/tools/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet23]Recommended”>Home - Recommended Reading - LibGuides at American Library Association) </p>
<p>Or there are a lot of good suggestions in this thread on the parents forum:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/403424-one-best-books-ive-read-last-6-months.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/403424-one-best-books-ive-read-last-6-months.html</a> </p>
<p>But read what you like. I usually give a book 100 pages, and if I am not hooked by then I ditch it. There are too many good books out there to read to slog through something I don’t like; life is too short. Sometimes I ditch 'em after 50 pages, and recently I gave up on a very popular novel on the NYT bestseller list after only 5 pages because I hated every character in it. But I picked up another book the same day and just read something else. So start reading a lot, and your CR scores will start to rise. You still might need some prep (practice on the types of reading sections and questions, and learn the grammar you need for the writing section multiple choice). But start the reading now and your scores WILL go up by the time you take the PSAT for real in 11th grade.</p>
<p>Thanks for all this information. </p>
<p>I haven’t entered high school yet, so no grades yet. However, I’m going to give it my all for that 4.0 GPA like I did in middle school.</p>
<p>As for the SAT, I will try both the approaches to improve my score. I’m strangely much better at vocab/writing than critical reading. Sometimes I’m flawless on the sentence completions before the passages but end up missing quite a few on the CR.</p>