The College Solutions Blog

April 5, 2020

If you have teenagers who expected to take Advanced Placement tests this year, the College Board recently released detailed information about this year’s unusual roll out of AP exams. How the College Board is dealing with AP tests during the COVID-19 pandemic was bound to be controversial and it is. Some people wanted the College Board to cancel the AP...

January 29, 2015

Parents and teenagers are already dreading the new, radically different SAT test that will debut in March 2016. If your child plans to take this test, you absolutely need to read the post below. Jed Applerouth, PhD, the founder of Applerouth Tutoring Services, shared his detailed thoughts about the revamped test with his own families and he gave me permission...

December 2, 2014

In my experience, high quality, independent test-prep firms produce some of the best college newsletters. One newsletter that I always make sure I read comes from Compass Education Group, which offers test prep in Northern and Southern California.  Today I am sharing a thought-provoking post that Matt Steiner, who is Compass Education’s marketing director, originally wrote for the test-prep firm’s...

August 25, 2014

My son Ben is heading back to high school this week. Ben graduated from Beloit College in May with a degree in mathematics, but his new school year started this morning at Lincoln High, a predominantly Hispanic school in Denver.  He will be spending the year as a teacher-in-training in the classrooms of two mentor mathematics teachers. Through the Teacher...

February 13, 2014

The College Board released its latest annual AP report this week. You can also see the entire report here: 10th Annual AP Report to the Nation AP classes are a creature of the College Board so keep in mind that the organization will always spin the AP statistics in a positive way in its report. One of the great unresolved...

August 28, 2013

I created a slideshow for my college blog at CBS MoneyWatch today that shares 10 tips for writing a winning college essay. Minerva, my eight-year-old golden retriever, illustrates Tip. No. 3. Please check it out! LO I wrote the following post in August, 2011, but with college students heading back to school, I decided it was well worth running again....

December 13, 2012

What is the best way to ace your final exams? This is a timely question as millions of high school and college students are taking their final exams. You might assume that reading textbooks and notes over and over again is the best way to study, but researchers from Purdue and Washington University insist that it’s not the best approach....

September 26, 2012

The College Board released its latest SAT score results this week and the results are once again disappointing. The average score for the reading portion of the SAT is at its lowest level in four decades. The high school seniors in the class of 2012 earned an average reading score of 496 out of a maximum of 800. That represents...

August 15, 2012

How do you evaluate a college’s learning disability services? In today’s blog post I’m sharing some questions that parents and students should ask when visiting a school (or contacting a disability office by phone.) Joy App, a college consultant in Houston, who was my source for yesterday’s post on learning disabilities, provided the questions that you’ll see below. Like other...

August 12, 2012

Does your teenager have a learning disability? If so, the whole college process might seem even more daunting. With these parents in mind, I recently talked with Joy App, a college consultant in Houston, who has worked with many teenagers with learning disabilities. I am passing along some of her advice for parents of learning disabled teenagers. To start, I’m...