@Gator88NE, did your S take the in-school SAT or regular Saturday one?
I just followed the link below to the ACT’s letter about the concordance tables. They come out very strongly against adcoms using the tables, particularly the one that concords new SAT to ACT. They say the tests can’t be concorded until after a year’s worth of data has been collected. I don’t know; adcoms may just ignore this letter and use the concordance tables, because that is all they have. But, yet another way in which these big companies are causing problems for the Class of 2017.
http://www.act.org/content/act/en/about-act/perspectivesandhappenings.html
Huge congratulations to your dd @Mom2aphysicsgeek 
What an accomplishment!
@whereismykindle What I shared with you is what she submitted. Thanks for the congrats!
@ynotgo Thanks for sharing that link. That was an interesting read. I had no idea that they had collaborated on the old conversion charts.
My daughter has a list that might actually be her final list (11 schools—I’d rather see 9 or 10, but that’s just me—not counting the two in-state options that don’t offer anything even close to what she’s interested in but would be free tuition because I work for the university system); might be worth posting sometime in the summer so we can all compare notes.
Anyway, today’s AP Stats (her small school offers AP Stats and AP Calc in alternating years, so it’s pragmatic utility this year and fun magic next year), and then we’re done with AP testing until next year, when it might only be AP Calc, since they’re shifting her cohort into dual-enrollment with first-semester college composition rather than an AP Lang course (and she refuses to take APUSH, due in part to friction with the teacher). She’s happy with her ACT scores, too, so no more testing at all for a year, for that matter—hurrah!
@Agentninetynine thanks for that blog tip, I hadn’t seen that one and it looks fabulous to start following. Of course today’s topic is why I pretty much hate everything on our safety list lol. Hate is strong but…ugh.
@2muchquan love that link for comparison purposes. I track a lot of it on my own…that is a nice snapshot with different options.
@Gator88NE same conversations here. Well, without the Princeton and MIT part. :)) I asked him, for mothers day, to look at just ONE school on a certain list. Checked in on Tuesday.
“I looked at one”
Which one?
“I don’t remember”
It made that much of an impression?
“Yep”
Sigh.
@MSHopeful question on the NCP waiver. In looking at our schools, about half seem to ask for the NCP version and the rest do not. Does that mean (never having filled out a profile form lol) that we won’t need to provide any info on the NCP for those schools, only the ones that show NCP PROFILE as required? Trying to figure out if that actually helps or hurts in our situation. We will be almost certainly needing a waiver.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek congrats to your dd, that’s wonderful!
D is signed up for the June SAT. We were pretty happy with her March scores, but the engineering dept at her HS strongly recommends taking each test twice. And with super-scoring there doesn’t seem to be any drawback. My one worry is that she is doing the writing section. Four schools on her list require writing (with either ACT or SAT). Honestly, they are four of the schools that I think aren’t right for her or where she wouldn’t get merit. But I can’t blame her for wanting to do the writing and get it over with. She’s so funny – we were talking about the SAT this morning and she said “I guess I’ll have to start studying as soon as school’s out” (May 26) and I about did a double-take. “You mean you have to start studying now!” Her – “Oh, riiiiight!” At least her hardest final is done (AP chem) and she’ll have one more final done before finals week. I’m really just expecting some light daily practice on Khan and at least one practice test.
@jedwards70
I think you might be able to find your S’s “magic school” or at least something close. Writing screenplays for a year takes some serious effort – maybe it’s not so temporary (if not screenwriting, then something related). Though I’d agree that he should go somewhere with other options. I would recommend going to the film majors section of CC (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/visual-arts-film-majors/) and asking your questions there. I’ve gotten some great advice in the Engineering majors section.
Well, I just signed D17 up for the June SAT without the essay.
I am creating (like others) a, hmm, I don’t want to call it a “war room”, maybe “Table of Knowledge” in the dining room with all the books, info, etc. Potentially one of Claire Dunphy’s whiteboards might appear later…
Anyway, I’m pulling all the info together into the binder that used to house my Spanish book, and I realize that D’s December SAT is a 1950 (CR+M+W), and she would have needed a 1960 to get NMF last year. Then I start getting uneasy about the fact that she’d have to wait until October 1 to take it this year, AND she’d have to keep doing the Magoosh stuff to keep it fresh in her mind, and she’s SOOOOO sick of doing the magoosh online tutorial.
Sooo, I venture upstairs and talk to her (I took notes before I did so I didn’t ramble, lol). Long story short, she says yeah I’ll take the SAT June 4 and the ACT June 11 and try to knock them both out of the park and be done with it.
I said (and I feel) that if we have all the numbers in over the summer, even if she doesn’t make NMF or NMSF, she’ll know what to target in terms of merit and schools. I also worried that if she did make NMSF and had to take the October SAT, the pressure would be bad for her to get a good score. I don’t think she needs to do the essay because she got an 8 on the Dec one, which I think is ok?
I showed her one school that already would offer her automatic full tuition with a 1950 (CR+M+W, I think it was Florida A&M) because she doesn’t think she’ll get in anywhere, and I said, hey, you’ve already got that, now it’s an evil game to see how many more you can get to, which speaks to her rather dark and nefarious sense of humor. She seemed relieved to see that in black and white, and to see that she’s pretty close for some other substantial automatic scholarships.
It’s so stressful. I don’t want to make a mistake that would take away opportunities for her.
@jedwards70 we have a close friend if S’s at USC doing a cool mix of those things. Another less intense option to maybe look at is Ithaca, lots of options there.
@greeny8, as far as I know NM Scholars aren’t announced yet, however, the commended SI at 209 has been announced. We will only know if our kids made it to NM semifinalist level sometimes in September when each individual state’s cutoff scores are announced. Sorry to be a spoil-sport, but see thread here and don’t bother reading all 297 pages!
My son surprised me by saying he wanted to take the SAT and ACT again in June. I had signed him up for both earlier, but I was fully expecting him to blow them off. I think his competitive juices are flowing and he wants to up his scores a bit. I don’t know how he’s going to handle the studying aspect of these tests though as his school work his ramping up, lax playoffs coming up, finals around the corner. For some reason he does not appear to be stressed out, just rolling with it.
@jedwards70 I don’t know about anything about it personally, but VCU has a film dept that friends say is very good.
http://bulletin.vcu.edu/undergraduate/arts/cinema-program/cinema-ba/cinema-ba.pdf
@eandesmom I think if the NCP info is required it will say somewhere in the financial aid section of the school’s website. Most schools that require CSS do use NCP as far as I know. The only one I’ve come across that doesn’t is UChicago. Some schools use FAFSA only and in that case, no NCP info is required.
Speaking of taking notes, @MotherOfDragons , I just made a list of posts I wanted to comment on. There’s so much going on here! I think it’s NM’s evil game not announcing cutoffs and qualifying SAT scores until fall. Essentially, this summer, we will be making two lists. One that assumes no NMSF and one that assumes NMSF (and for that we are hoping the March SAT score he got is good enough). Since S has about as much enthusiasm as @Gator88NE and @eandesmom DCs for the college research, this will be a fun summer.
Congrats on your D’s achievement @Mom2aphysicsgeek!
@snoozn I haven’t spent much time over on the engineering forum. It’s so comfy here. But I will need to brave it and see what I can pick up for dual college lists this summer.
I think I need to stay in this thread and away from the SAT talk elsewhere on CC. They are starting to make me a little bit paranoid, though D did really well, in my opinion.
I finally got some details about AP Lang. She actually found the passages and essay topics really interesting so wrote a lot (which often she does not). AP Spanish Lang to go next week. D wishes she had been able to take all AP exams last week instead of over 3 weeks, because then she’d be done. Finals are optional for her, so she only plans on taking 1 to try to raise her grade in that class. Since she only had AP classes this year, they aren’t doing much in school for the rest of the month. School gets out first week of June. A few classes have fun projects, a couple of class trips are coming up, otherwise in the other classes, they are literally doing nothing. D is using the free time to read and work on her projects for the other classes. She has been catching up on her sleep after school, which is good.
Summer plans are almost all set. She’s still working on one other volunteer gig, but then she’ll have a pretty good summer schedule. She’s excited for school to be over and about her summer plans but not so excited about the essay writing. With the down time, I will nag and nag until she really starts looking at the schools on her list that she hasn’t looked at too closely yet. lol The list won’t get shortened, if at all, until after the NMSF announcement in September. I think this year, large merit scholarships are going to be more competitive than ever, so I’m considering adding a few more schools to her list if she doesn’t make NMSF.
My daughter didn’t really care about the whole National Merit thing, and so didn’t freak out terribly when she took her sister’s calculator by mistake and couldn’t get it to work(!) when she started the math section. She lost some time doing stuff by hand, though, and as a result didn’t do well on that part, and despite being near-perfect on the language side just missed commended.
From the parental point of view, the extra money would have been nice, but with a few glaring exceptions (Alabama would give her an annual stipend plus one year of housing!), the money she’d have gotten from it would have been a marginal plus, but to be honest we have to chase bigger merit aid than that to make the finances work.
@itsgettingreal17 Reading SAT and ACT threads on CC is like reading the chance me threads on steroids. Yeah, don’t read them. FWIW, if I had been reading CC before ds applied to SSP, I would have been convinced he was off in lala land applying. I was so glad I didn’t venture in here until after he had attended!
I think that CC is far more test score obsessed than actual college admissions. Yes, test scores matter, but only to a degree. No, a marginal difference in scores is not going to lead to acceptance or rejection.
@itsgettingreal17 He took the regular Saturday exam, but the proctors handed out the wrong booklets (SAT without essay) and that caused a great deal of confusion. Seems nobody that tested in his group, has gotten back their scores. He’s friend who got special accommodations (sight impaired), is the only one to get his scores on time (since he wasn’t involved in the booklet fiasco).
He’s re-taking the SAT in June, but I had hope that the test scores would motivate him to study for this next test!
@dfbdfb There are some pretty good auto and competitive full rides out there for NM. Are you looking for full rides only?
I should have made my screen name “IJustNag”.