The College Solutions Blog

April 13, 2021

As usual, the highly rejective colleges** have attracted the most media attention during this latest admission season. The Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, USC and other highly rejective colleges outdid themselves this year by crushing the college dreams of an historic number of applicants. What gets lost in this slavish attention to the nation’s highly rejective schools is the inside...

March 10, 2021

Earlier this month, I discussed the current college admission landscape with Mark Salisbury, the creator of TuitionFit, a nonprofit that’s been compared to the Kelly Blue Book of college pricing. We shared our thoughts about what happened to college admission landscape last year and also shared our predictions about what will happen to college admissions in 2021. If you are...

February 8, 2021

If your child is a high school junior, it could be trickier this year to decide whether to take the SAT or ACT in 2021 (assuming greater availability) and also whether to submit scores. To help with this decision, I am running an informative post written by Bruce Reed, a cofounder of Compass Education Group, which regularly creates high quality...

April 1, 2020

High school students are stressed about when they will be able to take the SAT and/or ACT test again, but there is some good news during the COVID-19 pandemic . A steady stream of colleges and universities have been announcing that they will not require SAT or ACT test scores for the 2021-2022 school year and possibly beyond that admission...

March 7, 2016

For the past two years, teenagers and their parents across the country have been dreading the new SAT test. The College Board announced back in 2014 that it would be dramatically revamping the SAT to align the new test with the Common Core. The wait for this test ended on March 5 (Saturday) when the College Board rolled out the...

October 13, 2015

Today I am sharing an excellent analysis of the new SAT, which makes its premiere in March, 2016.  Jed Applerouth, the founder of Applerouth Tutoring Services wrote the piece, which I found so insightful that I asked him for permission to run it on my blog. Lynn O’Shaughnessy By Jed Applerouth By our appraisal, the revised SAT is superior in...

October 5, 2015

Should juniors in high school take the new SAT test? This is a question that many 11th graders are stressing out about as the rollout for the new SAT approaches. The dramatically overhauled test will make its premiere on March 5, 2016. Juniors will be the first to grapple with this question because the launch date of the new test...

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...

September 8, 2014

Today’s college blog post was written by Bruce Reed, a principal at Compass Education Group, a popular test-prep firm in California. In the past, Reed explores whether students can gain an edge by strategically picking their SAT testing dates. This is the last in a series of expert posts about ACT and SAT scoring. You’ll find links to the other...