At the request of an aquaintance, I recently asked Fred Hargadon and Don Betterton what they thought about college sports strategizing. More specifically, I asked them if parents should steer their children into playing one sport over another in order to enhance their children’s changes of being recruited by colleges as student-athletes down the road. Here is what Fred and Don had to say: (more…)
An old friend of mine sent me this New York Times article yesterday. Some of the students interviewed for the article remind me of one of my former college roommates who thought that his freshman year at Princeton was a lot easier than his senior year in high school. (I thought he was joking when he first made the comment, but I quickly learned that he wasn’t.) According to the article, it seems more and more advanced high school students are “yawning” their ways through their first year or two of college.
Some Final Exhortations Before You Get Started
Keep a clear head.
Keep an open mind.
Don’t take shortcuts.
Be realistic, but don’t be afraid to aim high.
Don’t rely on myths, rumors, or anecdotes.
Don’t stereotype people or colleges.
Seek advice, but make up your own mind.
Don’t generalize from small samples. (For example, if the only person you know who happened to have been admitted by a particular college last year ranked first-in-the-class, it hardly means that that college admits only students who rank first-in-the-class!) In other words, don’t confuse the local with the universal. (more…)
We’ve covered guessing on the SAT Math questions and Critical Reading sections. Now it’s time to discuss the dreaded SAT Writing section, particularly the multiple choice questions (you had better not “guess” on the essay) 
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Evaluating Applications
While I don’t think any two colleges proceed in precisely the same manner when evaluating applications and making admission decisions, I am confident that the ultimate goal is the same — to admit a richly diverse freshman class that is comprised of students who have convinced the admissions staff, in one way or another, that they are capable of successfully pursuing and completing the college’s academic programs.
Here, in short form, is what happens in the admission offices of many selective colleges:
1. Your transcript is considered of primary importance. Staff members look at (more…)
I’d like to briefly share my thoughts with you on guessing in the critical reading section. The critical reading section has two different parts: The first part is sentence completion; there are blanks in the sentence and you need to fill it in with the answer choice. Each answer choice will have a word or a couple of words if there are two blanks; you need to understand the context of the sentence. You then need to pick the words that fill in the sentence properly from the SAT vocabulary list. (more…)
