nailing your sat score

You have to keep them focused on what's important ...their time management is not where it should be yet. Which is what will get them where they want to go. My rule of thumb was to put the same time into study as you put into baseball practice.

Ozone

Did you find that he was more focused and "into it" during the baseball season--I always felt they had to monitor and control their time in as better fashion during baseball season

Once he got used to the routine he found it pretty easy. If he knew he had a late day he would find an hour during lunch period and free period. The same thing that drove him to be good at baseball also drove him to beat out kids academically. He knew he would have a academic break in the summer.

I have heard that some of the upper tier academic institutions are not going to look at the SAT/ACT scores in the furture. How long before all schools do not require the SAT/ACT test?

My son was a 2-sport varsity athlete so was used to budgeting his time for more than half the school year. He had to learn to manage his time or else the grades would've suffered. He made time on his own to prepare for the SATs. He did it on his own. He did fine on the SAT. He took it twice and the overall scores were a little better but not much, which is typical for just about everyone who takes them. He got accepted in his first choice for college so it worked out.

cbg, don't think that will happen any time soon. Although, there had been some discussion when the SAT folks had all of those testing problems in the past few years (coupled with the revamping of the test to 3 sections instead of 2), that seems to have tabled.

Colleges/universities do all consider them slightly differently, however. That is to say, some require and consider all three portions of the SAT, many require but consider only two (excluding the writing portion), only some require SAT IIs (previously known as subject tests), and one (Princeton) still requires 3 SAT IIs, all others require two. Just about all will take either the SATs or the ACT. And next year, just to make things more complicated than they already are, the SAT is instituting a new "rule" - they are following suit with the ACT. You can now select which of the SAT test sittings you wish to send (previously, once you sent an SAT score to any college, all of your test sitting scores went along with).

As zomby suggests, it is a good idea to sit for either or both exams twice, as expert evaluation shows that scores will likely improve in a subsequent sitting. Not to mention the fact that if you score about the same, it shows the college/university that your marks are consistent (in other words that really high score you got wasn't a fluke after all ) However, there is a break point where things do not get better, probably after 3 or 4 sittings.

One more clarification - if a school requires SAT IIs (not all do), with one exception, I believe they require 2 different subjects.

Oh, and some colleges will take the best sitting, some will combine the best scores from all sittings.


Confusing enough for you? (Sorry 'bout that). Easiest thing to do is buy a Fiske's Guide, or go to Peterson's or Princeton Review and check out each school's requirements.

In regard to SAT prep, we do it a bit differently than has been indicated on here. While it may not work for everyone, it has worked very well for our baseball program.

I run a summer program, and realizing the importance of SAT scores in our players moving along, I went to Kaplan and negotiated a special deal for any player affiliated with our program on their PSAT and SAT combination tutoring program. Kaplan provides 51 hours of tutoring, 15 hours for the PSAT and 36 hours for the SAT, of courese along with all of the necessary support materials for the student to take home. We have our own Kaplan instructor, our own classroom and schedule. We generally schedule our sessions for Sunday afternoons, beginning in mid-January to prepare them for the March SAT; while the PSAT segment is offered the previous September/October to prepare them for the PSAt that is given in mid-October.

Our team has to provide a minimum of ten students per year, and for that Kaplan gives our families a very significant discount off of their regular tuition fee. We've been doing this for three years now, and about 40 of our boys (and friends of the program) have taken the Kaplan course.

While most of the boys will tell you they don't necessarily enjoy the course, I've yet to have a player tell me he didn't think it helped him acheive higher scores.

The success of this program is one of the key components to our efforts to prepare our boys for going through the recruiting process.

06 - what an absolutely fabulous idea! I wish more travel programs had this imbedded. I am a believer in prepping for the exams - with a tutor preferrably. Sad to say, tutoring IMHO has become a necessary "evil."