Thursday, May 26, 2016

Comparison and Concordance of the New SAT and ACT

By May 9, 2016

New SAT results and concordances are in! But what do they mean? How have scores changed from the old SAT? And how can scores help students determine whether the SAT or ACT should be favored? 
Compass has analyzed available research and concordances to create a comparison tool in both chart and table forms below (or access the PDF for easy distribution). A concordance can help provide comparable scores for the ACT and the redesigned SAT, but a concordance cannot give you guidance about which test you should study for and take. Although many students will find that their SAT and ACT scores intersect somewhere in the gray “Judgment Call” band, some may discover that one test is actually better suited to their skills.
New SAT to ACT Decision Chart
The release of March SAT scores and the publication of New SAT concordance tables means that students are armed with more information about the respective merits of the SAT and ACT. Sometimes there are specific reasons why a student prefers one test over another: National Merit requirements, scheduling needs, or a strong negative reaction to a previous testing experience. For most students, however, the question comes down to “where is my time best spent?” Three common situations are:
  1. You took the old SAT in January 2016 or earlier and want to know if you are “done.” The concordance tables can help you see where your old SAT score stacks up in comparison to the new SAT and to the ACT. Since retaking an old SAT is not an option, you will need to decide on a path forward if you are not satisfied with your scores. The old SAT and redesigned SAT are completely different tests, so you should not favor the New SAT simply because of experience on the old exam. Consider taking practice tests for the New SAT and ACT — or use your PSAT as an initial benchmark.
  2. You took the New PSAT and have taken a practice or real ACT. You can use the tables provided on our PSAT post. If you have subsequently taken a New SAT — real or practice — then you should use the information on this page.
  3. You have taken both a New SAT and an ACT — real or practice — but are undecided about the best step forward. Use the chart above and tables below to inform your decision.
sat-to-act-instructions
new-sat-to-act-decision-table
In order to see how ACT and SAT scores compare, we have provided two useful concordance tables. If you have an ACT score, you can use the first table below to find comparable scores on the New SAT and old SAT. If you have taken the New SAT, the second table gives you a score-by-score comparison with the old SAT and ACT. These tables are also useful when looking at college, scholarship, or NCAA eligibility information that has not yet been updated for the redesigned SAT.
act-new-sat-old-sat-concordance
new-sat-old-sat-act-concordance

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

University of Vermont Summer Opportunities

UVM Summer Pre-College Programs
http://www.uvm.edu/~summer/precollege

UVM Summer Academy is an outstanding academically challenging program for high school students who have completed 10th, 11th, or 12th grade and features world-class faculty and a vibrant campus community. Residential and commuter options are available.
Successful students receive 3 UVM college credits, a greater understanding of what college life is like first-hand and a head start on their college career. For students interested in a non-credit experience learn more about our UVM Engineering Institute.

Dates

UVM Summer Academy is a hybrid program with 2 weeks of on campus work and 2 weeks of online work:

Summer Academy

Complete program dates: July 10 – August 5, 2016
On Campus dates: July 10 – July 22, 2016
Online dates: July 23 – August 5, 2016
LEARN MORE
Students are required to complete both the on campus and online portions of the program to be successful.

Who Should Apply

Summer Academy Students
UVM Summer Precollege Programs are open to high school students who have completed 10th, 11th, or 12th grade who are capable of successfully completing a 3 credit college level course taught by one of UVM’s many distinguished faculty. During the application process, we require Parent/Guardian approval to ensure that the student is ready and able to participate in the UVM Summer Academy.
Applications now being accepted for Summer Academy.

Rethinking The Meaning Of Colleges' Low Acceptance Rates


Rethinking The Meaning Of Colleges' Low Acceptance Rates

Willard Dix 
  Contributor
I cover the college admission process and how it affects families.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
970 views
In my last entry I called students who apply to high status, low admission rate colleges and universities “cannon fodder.” Charging ahead to breach the walls of these institutions has increasingly become an exercise in futility even for the best, most accomplished students. Admission officers at these schools routinely tell audiences they could “fill the class two or three times over” from the reject pile. They supposedly mean this comment to be comforting, but it provides little solace to the rejected students lying desolate on the field of battle.

I return to this metaphor because of the damage done to students entering the college admission process. Those inculcated with the idea that only a high status college will do for their post-secondary lives must endure a four-year slog through high school to position themselves for a virtually impossible result. When they’re rejected, all that work seems to have been for naught. They have lost their four years of high school pursuing a fruitless goal, with the end results being cynicism about the system, regret over lost time, mental and physical exhaustion and a feeling that studying and being active don’t really matter.

To put it bluntly: They become collateral damage. Let’s look at a few numbers from the current admission season (College class of 2020) to see how many students fell during ”The Charge of the Bright Brigade”:
Institution % Accepted Brigade Numbers Left on the Battlefield
Stanford 4.69 43,997 41,934
Harvard 5.2 39,044 37,014
Princeton 6.46 29,313 27,429
Brown 9 32,390 29,475
Columbia 6.04 36,292 33,970
Yale 6.27 31,455 29,483
MIT 7.81 19,020 17,535
Penn 9.4 38,918 35,260
I didn’t even bother to include Dartmouth or Cornell with their comparatively generous double-digit acceptance rates (10.5% and 14%, respectively). It’s clear that applying to these institutions is a losing proposition.

Although colleges love to crow about these numbers, they conceal a fact that few outsiders realize: A low acceptance rate, along with high scores, grades and other characteristics, indicates inputs, not outputs. It says nothing about what, how or whether students learn once they’re there. (More than one Harvard student has told me that the hardest thing about Harvard is getting in.)

In his new book, Are You Smart Enough? How Colleges’ Obsession With Smartness Shortchanges Students, UCLA professor emeritus Alexander Astin refutes the idea that high selectivity automatically equals excellent education. [Aside from his many years of researching higher education, he also founded UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), so he is uniquely qualified to discuss this phenomenon.] Astin writes,
If you look at our higher education system from an educational perspective, this preoccupation with enrolling smart students makes little sense because the emphasis seems to be more on acquiring smart students than on educating them well. As a consequence, institutions and the public define the excellence of a college or university in terms of who enrolls rather than how well they are educated after they enroll. In the health care field, this would be the equivalent of judging a clinic or hospital on the basis of the condition of the patients it admits rather than the effectiveness of the care and treatment patients receive once they are admitted. (p. 25)
A low admit rate doesn’t really tell you anything about the institution’s effect on its students; it tells you about the students it accepts. One can say, “Well, it’s Yale, after all,” and that’s fine, but is that worth making the years of high school a boot camp to prepare for the losing battle to get into Yale? Increasingly, students report they arrive at college burned out, with no sense of why they’re there. In high schools, rates of depression and anxiety have risen for any number of reasons, but college admission is one. Knowing that highly competitive colleges look for “passion” in their applicants, students obsess over ways to find it or, worse, create it when it really isn’t isn’t there yet.

Despite the almost inevitable prospect of rejection, more and more students seem willing to charge into the volley that will cut them down. Simultaneously they (or their parents) refuse to consider institutions that would love to have them, often because their acceptance rates seem to indicate a lack of quality. It’s an issue of status, not education, in that case. (I once had a very well-educated mother in tears on my office sofa because her son would have to attend Tufts instead of Brown. That was before Tufts’ admit rate plummeted to its current 14%. I imagine she’d be happier now.)

It pays to know that while the Ivies’ admit rates have shrunk, the average university acceptance rate is still above 50%, which means plenty of schools welcome good students eager to learn and contribute to their campuses. It also makes sense to ask, if you care, where all those rejects from the Ivies go–surely they don’t simply crawl off to live in the basement. They very likely attend other schools just as good but without the advantage of name recognition. As Astin puts it, to a large extent “the entire process is being driven by the folklore about institutional quality or excellence, our shared cultural beliefs about which are the best colleges and universities.” (p. 30)

Instead of hurling themselves futilely into the low admit rate battle, students should look for schools that would appreciate their talents and enjoy having them on campus. I’m not arguing that the Ivies and their kin aren’t good schools for some students; I’m saying they don’t need you, and they’re proud of the fact. That’s something to be concerned about.

One final story: I used to show the low percentages to students fixated on Ivies hoping at least getting them to be realistic. That almost never worked. I then happened to read a medical study about how patients determined whether or not to have a particular procedure done. If the doctor said there was a 10% chance of success, the patient usually said “OK, let’s do it.” But if the doctor led with “There’s a 90% chance of failure,” the patient usually declined to have the procedure.

As the college search process starts to heat up, I urge families to reject high rejection institutions in favor of those with more favorable statistics. The values represented by that minuscule number are not about education but about how well the institution can collect smart kids. Understand, too: colleges that respect students’ histories as they are rather than having compelled them to sacrifice themselves for that scarce admit may be much better choices in the long run, not just academically but personally. Students can enjoy their high school and extracurricular lives without worrying about how every move will look to an institution that ultimately doesn’t care. They can arrive at college feeling as though they are at the beginning of an exciting adventure, not at the end of a marathon.
(Excessive anxiety and obsession over getting into college as early as freshman year of high school lead to something I’ve called Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]. I’ll talk about that in another post.)
 
See my blog at collegeculture.net for essays about the college admission process itself.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Class of 2018 College Tour Opportunity

Attention Class of 2018 (sophomores) and parents/guardians:  WA will be offering our first combination college tour/sightseeing trip during the February 2017 school break.  As rising juniors, the trip will be initially opened to your class only.  The trip will include visits to Georgetown University, George Washington University, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Columbia University and two additional colleges.  We will also be sightseeing in Washington DC, Philadelphia and NYC with a trip to a Broadway play.  A trip information session will be held on Thursday, May 26th at 6:30pm in the lecture hall.  You can also email Tracy McLaughlin in the guidance office at tmclaughlin@westfordk12.us for more information. 

Penn State Honors College Summer Scholars Day Open House

The Schreyer Honors College at Penn State University will host its Summer Scholars Day Open House on Friday, June 17. This is an opportunity for prospective students and their families to learn more about the Schreyer Honors College and Penn State through Scholar student panels and presentations by Deans and the SHC Admissions staff. The event also includes an information fair with various University departments and academic colleges.

The Schreyer Honors College is a leading force in honors education nationwide. We provide numerous opportunities for academically prepared students to achieve excellence with a keen focus on leadership and civic engagement. Our Scholars graduate prepared for rewarding careers at some of the world’s leading businesses and organizations. They are also accepted into some of the best graduate schools and programs across the nation and around the globe.

Register at: https://www.shc.psu.edu/events/item.cfm?id=2578

Friday, May 13, 2016

Camp College at UMass Amherst


Class of 2017 Updates

Please turn in your green teacher recommendation form to your counselor ASAP. 

Coast to Coast College Tour
An evening information program with the admission representatives of Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley, and Vanderbilt University.
Sunday June 5
7 - 9 pm
Boston Marriott Cambridge
50 Broadway
Cambridge, MA 02142

University of Vermont Summer Pre-College Programs
http://www.uvm.edu/~summer/precollege/
 
St. Joseph School of Nursing in Nashua 
Admissions Open House on Wed. June 1st
Information Sessions begin promptly at 3:00, 4:00 and 5:00pm
Free Parking in hospital garage
Register for this event at www.sjson.edu

Refuge Art Series Summer Registration
Various courses offered in all day sessions from 10am - 1pm
Portfolio Development
Evening Sessions: 5:30 - 8:30 pm
Contact refugelowell@gmail.com for questions

It Girls Overnight Retreat, this October 9 - 10 on the Syracuse University campus!
https://itgirls.ischool.syr.edu/user/itgirl-registration/
What do we look for in an It Girl?
•    Girls that are enthusiastic, curious, and engaged about technology, entrepreneurship, big data, or other related technology fields
•    High-achieving, college-bound female juniors and seniors
•    Have a GPA of 3.2 or better (unweighted)
•    A well-written 100 word essay on their interest in technology, entrepreneurship, big data, or other related technology fields

What Do Your New SAT Scores Really Mean?

An Update on New SAT Scores and Concordance Tables
by Summit Educational Group

After a prolonged waiting period, scores from the March 5th administration of the redesigned SAT will be available this week to schools and students.  As promised, the [ https://www.collegeboard.org/ ]College Board has provided a number of concordance tables and tools so that everyone understands what these new scores mean:

Concordance Tables Released by CollegeBoard

·         New SAT/ACT, p. 12 (Table 7)

·         ACT/New SAT, p. 20 (Table 15)

·         New SAT/Old SAT, p. 8 (Table 1), p. 9 (Table 2)

·         Old SAT/New SAT, p. 15 (Table 9) and p. 16 (Table 10).    


We will have more to share on this subject soon, but an initial look at the concordance tables indicates that the new SAT scores are higher – but not better – than the old scores, very similar to what we saw with the scores for the new PSAT compared to the old PSAT. This disparity is consistent with the College Board’s messaging that the new SAT scores would not be identical to the old SAT scores, in spite of the familiar 200 - 800 point scale used for both tests. 

Depending on where on the scale you look, the verbal and math sections of the new SAT are each about 10-50 points higher compared to the old SAT score.  The smallest gaps are at the extremes of the curves (scores approaching the 200 and 800 ends of the scale) and are widest for those scores in the middle.  For example, a score of 1000 on the old SAT for the verbal and math sections (the national mean) is now a combined score of 1090 on the new SAT – on the surface an improvement of 90 points for the student.

As we discussed when the PSAT scores were released, all of us, including college admissions officers, will have to rely on the new concordance tables to truly understand the comparison between the old SAT, new SAT, and ACT scores.  Just as with the re-centering of SAT scores that took place in 1995, colleges will initially rely on these concordance tables to fully understand these scores.  Eventually, however, these scores on the new SAT will become the new normal and will stand alone.  Colleges will still rely on the ACT – new SAT concordance table to compare scores across the two tests.

Below are some additional useful links:

SAT Score Converter – A mobile app and online tool to compare scores on the new SAT, the old SAT, and the ACT.

New SAT Scores to Old SAT Scores

Old SAT Scores to New SAT Scores

Free Practice from CollegeBoard

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Scholarship Opportunity - Class of 2016


Horatio Alger Association Career & Technical Scholarship Program

This program provides financial assistance to students throughout the nation who have financial need and have exhibited integrity and perseverance in overcoming personal adversity. Criteria includes high school completion this spring and a commitment to pursue and complete a career or technical certificate/degree. 
Apply online at application.horatioalger.org by June 1.

Class of 2017 Updates - Summer Programs and Open Houses/Information Sessions


SAT/ACT

The registration deadline for the June SAT is May 11 - log on to www.collegeboard.org to register.

The registration deadline for the June ACT is May 6 - log on to www.actstudent.org to register.

College Information Sessions

Colleges that Change Lives Information Session
May 14, 2016 at 10 AM
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel
www.ctcl.org/events/programs

Exploring College Options Information Sessions - www.exploringcollegeoptions.org
Representatives from Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, UPenn, and Stanford
Sunday, May 22 at 7:00 pm
Hyatt Regency Boston
One Avenue de Lafayette
Boston, MA 02111
(617) 912-1234

Monday, May 23 at 7:00 pm
Sheraton Needham
100 Cabot Street
Needham, MA 02494
(781) 444-1110

Washington University in St. Louis Admissions Information Session
Sunday, May 15 from 7:00 - 8:00 pm
Boston Marriott Cambridge
50 Broadway
Cambridge, MA
No reservation needed. Call (800) 638-0700 or (314) 935-6000 for more information.

Summer Programs  

Marist Summer Pre-College
2016 Program Dates:
New York Session 1: June 26 - July 9
New York Session 2: July 10 - July 23
Italy: July 10 - July 23
Get more information and apply at www.marist.edu/precollege/apply.html

RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) College & Careers Program
This program is a two day program that helps students entering their senior year explore different academic and career options with RIT students and faculty. The program is offered twice this summer:
July 22-23
August 5-6
Register online at http://www.admissions.rit.edu/careers