<p>Have him take it. He doesn’t need to study, but he should know how to take the exam, and how it is graded. When he gets the results back he will know what areas he is weak in and can concentrate his study in those areas.</p>
<p>Hello,</p>
<p>My son watched me stress over older sister’s college search for two years before I started lightening up to realize that it is ultimately HER choice. (She has chosen seven schools, three with early action, she has one more with rolling admissions as a further back-up.) </p>
<p>Okay so now…my son. He is a great student, highly-motivated and top of his class, however he tends to stress about grades (guess where he got that from, but really, he is much smarter than I ever was). I was surprised when he came home today and insisted that he should be taking the PSATs as a sophomore. D took them as a junior, and at their school only juniors are automatically signed up for them. </p>
<p>On his own he went and spoke to his guidance counselor, who said she did not advise it for his sophomore year – some kids become “gun shy” if they don’t do well.</p>
<p>It is really not clear to me: is this a good idea, bad idea? I would tend to go with the guidance counselor’s opinion.</p>
<p>Our district requires all sophomores to take it (and it pays, too.) Juniors are not required.</p>
<p>I think it’s a good idea. If he scores fairly near National Merit Finalist area, it might be worth it to get some tutoring or buy a study book, etc. If he’s no where near, then the stress is off for junior year.</p>
<p>momcinco, my D is a sophomore and the school offers the opportunity for any of them to take it - freshman too. I think it’s a good idea as well. Also, there is a thread here for the parents of the high school class of 2015. Come join us!</p>
<p>In my school everyone took it both sophomore and junior year. I think the practice helped.</p>
<p>Thanks so much everybody. I got a lot of really useful and “real” advice before for D and I appreciate it. Good point missypie and liahfaile thanks for the input. And suzy100 thanks for the invitation!</p>
<p>S has not even begun to prepare. I think the exam is in early October (trying to figure out, guidance counselor said it is only administered once a year, in the fall?) D took a prep course for SATs and I thought S could do one this spring or next fall, but he caught me off guard. Kind of the way it works. I push D, but S pushes me!</p>
<p>Also does it look bad to go over GC’s head? I mean, she doesn’t know my son personally and is not his usual counselor. S went to her because she supervises his counselor and he thought he would get a more definitive answer. She did advise him against it, is it a big deal if we insist? We want to do Questbridge and I hope to have the counselors’ support.</p>
<p>Obviously I respect her opinion…but what I am hearing so far affirms S’s desire to take it now.</p>
<p>It can be useful practice for when it really does count (junior year for National Merit qualification) and for taking the SAT.</p>
<p>Late junior year is probably a good time to take one each of the SAT and ACT (some students do much better on one than the other). If it is desired to try to raise the score, study for the test that one initially did better on and retake it senior year.</p>
<p>Heck Yeah! Why on Earth not? It’s practice and can open doors.</p>
<p>At my kids’ h.s., they took the PSAT freshman,soph and junior yr. School system paid for it.</p>
<p>He doesn’t need to study for it. It doesn’t count for anything - it’s just practice.</p>
<p>It is good practice. Nothing beats real-world experience. If he is close to NMSF, then you might want to consider an SAT prep course for when he does it for real as a Junior.</p>
<p>I would “tell” the GC that he will take it.</p>
<p>Good idea.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>If he stresses about scores, tell him he is wise to get baseline information on where he needs to improve now so he will have plenty of time before he takes SAT’s. He will receive a thorough analysis of his efforts when he gets his scores.</p></li>
<li><p>If he is anywhere near NMF he will know what he needs to do, if he is not close - then just focus on gradually improving scores.</p></li>
<li><p>He will have a preliminary idea of which schools are possibilities, which schools are reaches, which schools are good back-ups.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Unless he is not planning to go to college, why not?</p>
<p>The difference between PSAT and SAT is one extra section and an essay. It is a test that does not count but gets colleges interested based on the score. It is also one to figure out how much more prep is needed for a future SAT.</p>
<p>Thank you for taking my side!</p>
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<p>To put it mildly, your GC is very much like his or peers. And that is not a compliment. They are rarely on top of what they should know, but have plenty of erroneous opinions.</p>
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<p>Not only does it not look bad, but that is what YOUR best interest dictates. Simply stated, the quicker you view your GC as a resource to get the paperwork submitted on time, and NOT expect anything else, the better off you will be. </p>
<p>The silver lining is that you got a taste to what it is to come early enough to make correction. In a perfect world, you would have found out how valuable it is to figure the entire HS schedule of classes and test BEFORE even starting the four years of high school. </p>
<p>Stepping off the soapbox, it really is a VERY good idea to take the PSAT this year. It is such a good idea that almost everyone should do, including the poor folks who are forced to sit for that ridiculous PLAN (the ACT poor cousin version of the PSAT.) It is a good idea because it defuses the typical BAD advice to wait until the junior year and use the results of the PSAT to dictate the next steps for the SAT. Waiting that long places more pressure of the calendar in the end of the junior and early senior year.</p>
<p>Go for it and do not let the school talk you out of it.</p>
<p>School districts should get rid of any guidance counselor who tells a sophomore not to take a test. what kind of a stupid advice is that when most school districts out there REQUIRE all sophomores to take it and pay for the test?</p>
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<p>Your GC should be supportive of any attempt to earn an outside scholarship. Although they have little to nothing to do with the actual successes, they like to brag about the results. The selection of the QB semi and finalists is pretty straightforward and the grades and essays are what matters -not the GC support or recommendation. This might have been different with the other big program (Gates Millennium) where the recommender’s input had a massive impact.</p>
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<p>Altough your are correct in the analysis, remember that the world of College Confidential and its focus of selective schools distorts the reality. The functions of GCs in many schools has little to do with the usual debates here. Once one understands their limitations, and learns to work around them, the path is clearer!</p>
<p>I think the GC is crazy. Gun shy…BS!</p>
<p>YES!! a soph SHOULD take the PSAT. then when he gets his results, use the key to go online and review what he got wrong.</p>
<p>*Quote:
School districts should get rid of any guidance counselor who tells a sophomore not to take a test. what kind of a stupid advice is that when most school districts out there REQUIRE all sophomores to take it and pay for the test?
*</p>
<p>I agree.</p>
<p>Don’t worry about counselor support and QB.</p>
<p>Anecdotal, but I think meaningful…</p>
<p>At my kids’ Catholic high school, the students always took the PSAT as sophs and jrs. They took PLAN as frosh.</p>
<p>Every year, the school had a good number of NMSFs… </p>
<p>THEN…a couple of years ago, the head GC convinced the principal to give some other test soph year.</p>
<p>Well, guess what? The school hasn’t had a NMSF since. </p>
<p>(when the change was announced, I sent an email to the principal suggesting that this would negatively affect the number of NMSFs at the school. My kids were out of the school at the time, so while I don’t have a dog in the hunt, I could see that it wasn’t a good idea. The principal responded with some gibberish about what the GC had researched, etc, and that he trusted her opinion. Well, now that the school has just had another Sept go by with no NMSFs again, I wonder if he’ll insist that the PSAT for sophs comes back. )</p>