The College Solutions Blog

March 5, 2013

If your child plans to take the ACT test, you should know about ACT superscoring. To understand what superscoring is, here’s some background: Historically, college admission offices used a student’s composite ACT score that’s made up of four underlying categories: English Mathematics Reading Science The test maker averages the four subcores, with each ranging from 1 to 36, to create...

March 1, 2013

I’ve got to confess that it’s rare that I find a book about college strategies that I like. Today I wanted to share with you a book that I actually believe is helpful. The name of the book is Right College, Right Price: A New System for Discovering the Best College Fit at the Best Price.  Frank Palmasani, who is...

February 28, 2013

Change is coming to the SAT test. A vice president at the College Board emailed its members this week to announce that the College Board will be redesigning the SAT. This will be the first revamping since 2005 when the essay was added and those infuriating analogies (cake is to icing as a unicycle is to __) were banished. The...

February 26, 2013

Where do the best college professors teach? This is an important question, particularly when you consider that traditional college professors are disappearing. Less than one out of three teachers on college campuses today are tenured or on the tenured track. Most college students today are being taught primarily by graduate students and part-time faculty. (See my post below about why...

February 22, 2013

After I published my last post on honors colleges, I heard from Stuart Nachbar, who produces amazingly in-depth profiles of primarily state universities at his website EducatedQuest, which I’d urge you to visit regularly. Stuart wrote a great piece on the pros and cons of honors college, which I’m sharing with you today: By Stuart Nachbar During our visits, we...

February 20, 2013

I received an email the other day from a college professor that reminded me once again that many wonderful schools exist beyond the cramped clique of institutions that hog most of the media’s attention. One place to look for promising academic opportunities can be at honors colleges within state universities. Honors colleges are fairly recent phenomenon. According to the National...

February 18, 2013

A couple of years ago I listened in on a webinar about SAT strategies that really impressed me. The guest speaker was Jeb Applerouth, who runs an eponymous test-prep firm that’s headquartered in Atlanta. Since the webinar, I occasionally visit Applerouth’s blog to see what he’s been writing about standardized testing. Jeb gave me permission to share the following blog...

February 13, 2013

In his State of the Union address last night, President Obama struck a blow for higher-ed transparency. In his address, Obama announced the release of a new College Scorecard that, he said,  “parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.” Every school now has...

February 11, 2013

I wanted to share a letter that I received recently from George Shen, a business consultant in the Greater Boston area and the father of three boys. Shen, a first-generation American who is concerned about how Asian Americans are treated in the admission process by elite schools, has formed a Facebook page entitled Asian Americans Against Affirmative Action. If you...

February 8, 2013

Earlier this week the Common Application organization released its new college essay prompts. For months plenty of people (myself included) worried that the advisory board of 15 counselors in charge of revising the prompts were going to recommend killing off Option 6, which encourages applicants to write creatively. Sure enough, Option 6 that allows applicants to write on the topic...