The College Solutions Blog

February 5, 2009

The University of California Board of Regents is expected today to approve the most sweeping admission changes to admissions in at least a decade at the nine UC campuses for undergraduates. The new requirements will allow 40% more high school graduates to be eligible for admission to the UC system. Many high school students are going to be relieved to...

January 9, 2009

Is the College Board being sneaky? It sure looks like it. Last summer the College Board announced a new policy called Score Choice that would allow students taking the SAT, beginning with the March 2009 test, to decide which results to send to colleges. The College Board has traditionally insisted that all scores — even embarrassing ones — be sent....

November 24, 2008

I hear a lot of crazy things when I drive the teenagers in my carpool to high school, but perhaps the strangest admission happened near the start of the school year. The four kids were talking about their SAT scores when Madison mumbled that his scores were low. I asked him what happened and he said he decided to see...

October 15, 2008

Baylor University wants to claw its way up the college rankings ladder in the worst way. The university’s student newspaper, The Lariat, caught the school red handed. In an article last week, the newspaper reported that the university had essentially bribed its incoming freshman to retake the SAT. Now this is awfully peculiar. After all, these kids had already been...

September 30, 2008

At the convention of the National Association for College Admission Counseling last week, the SAT generated a lot of angst. Big surprise. What I found amusing, however, was the discussion about developing a different test. At a crowded conference session, experts seemed to be kicking around the idea of a personality test. An executive at the College Board suggested building...

September 22, 2008

More bad news for the dreaded SAT test. The number of colleges and universities making the SAT or ACT optional continues to grow. In a new survey from FairTest.org, more than 775 colleges no longer require most students to submit scores from either standardized test. What’s more, a high-powered panel led by William R. Fitzsimmons, who oversees Harvard’s admission office,...

August 30, 2008

I thought I’d pass along today some of the statistics from the The Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual almanac, which was released this week. Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber so you can’t take a look yourself. In no particular order, here goes: Graduation rate at four-year colleges & universities: 56.4% (Women 59.2%) (Men 53%) Where high school graduates...

August 13, 2008

In July, The New York Times ran a lengthy front-page story about teenagers’ abandonment of books. Kids would rather read online than pick up a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird or a Jane Austen novel. My son Ben shares that sentiment. He will sometimes stumble onto a book that he loves like The Life of Pi, but it’s got...

August 12, 2008

I hate the SAT. I don’t know any parent who likes it except for one of my friends. Her daughter, who is now at Stanford, earned a perfect SAT reading score. I never heard her griping. A couple of years ago, I was worrying about how my daughter, who is now a college sophomore, would score on the SAT. When...

August 8, 2008

I believe most parents think high school students already suffer through too many standardized tests before they can toss their No. 2 pencils. Apparently the College Board, which makes loads of money off the the SAT, SAT subjects tests and the PSAT, has concluded that kids aren’t spending enough time filling little ovals into test booklets. The College Board has...