Appelrouth Tutoring Services | Atlanta's premier tutoring service for the SAT, ACT, GRE and more!

The college admissions essay is the single most important essay most students will write during their high school careers. For a student on the admissions margin, in particular, it can be a deciding factor in the admissions equation. While schedule strength, grades, and scores all need to be within the acceptable range for admission to a given school, the essay offers the student a chance to come alive as a human being and present an aspect of himself beyond the data points and quantitative metrics of the application. A well-crafted essay can turn an admissions reader into a vocal advocate in the event that a student’s application makes it to the admissions committee.
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As summer comes to a close and the collegiate admission process beckons, many parents and students must make the important decision whether to use the next few months to prepare for the SAT, the ACT or to simultaneously prepare for both tests. Extremely familiar with the SAT, the majority of parents who seek out our services assume that the SAT will be the best assessment for their children. Most parents personally endured the rite of sitting for the SAT during high school. Additionally, they know how their children fared on the 7th grade TIP assessment, and the 10th and 11th grade PSAT assessments. But for many, the ACT remains a mystery. A growing number of Atlanta students sit for the “pre-ACT”, the PLAN assessment in 10th grade: the vast majority of our students have no academic exposure to the ACT. Many parents have heard of the ACT as an alternative to the SAT but don’t know if it’s worthwhile to make the investment into ACT preparation or simply stick it out with the SAT. In this article I will explain the topical and structural differences between these two assessments in hopes of better informing this decision.
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Parents often come to us and ask when would be the ideal time for their children to sit for the major collegiate assessments such as the SAT and ACT. Parents are daunted by the sheer quantity of assessments and the variety of available administration dates. We subject our children to so many tests during their junior and senior years: PSATs, SAT 1s, ACTs, SAT 2s, APs and/or IBs. Poor planning can compound the stress that our students face, especially come spring. Good planning, however, can lower the stress levels for parents and students alike and really take the edge off of the testing and admissions processes.
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Without question, the most successful tutors are the most adept at motivating their students. Academic coaches, test-prep coaches, we are essentially brokers in motivation. Our job is to find a way to convince teenagers to log out of Facebook, minimize their four open chat windows, turn off their cell phones, and do SAT and ACT drills. To be effective, we must convince our students to come home early the night of Homecoming in order to be rested for a Saturday morning mock test. We must convince our students to drill vocabulary flashcards on the plane ride home from Spring Break. We must convince them that on top of the three and a half hours of homework their school teachers have assigned them, our homework is equally, if not more, important.
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With the October SAT behind us, the majority of seniors are shifting their focus away from preparing for the collegiate assessment tests toward fine-tuning and completing their college applications. A significant portion of our students are taking advantage of some form of early admissions. Some are participating in colleges’ non-binding Early Action programs; others, hoping to improve their chances of admission, are applying through binding Early Decision programs. Many students have already secured admission to schools by capitalizing on rolling admissions policies.
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To fully prepare for standardized tests, it’s necessary to navigate three distinct phases:

1. Understand the structure of the test.
   This involves learning the layout and format of the test, understanding the different types of questions, and finally understanding the scoring and grading process.
2. Master the content within the structure.
   Review the material: algebra, geometry, vocabulary, sentence completions, and reading comprehension. At ATS, we create strategies for each problem type and know how to approach every problem on the test.
3. Practice the test-taking skills to thrive in four hours (or longer if you qualify for extended-time) of pressured testing conditions.
   This is often the most neglected phase of test preparation and one of the essentials of our proven, successful method. To succeed, there are structural qualities of the tests which require particular skills and strategies if students are to maintain focus throughout hours of mental exercising. To build endurance, test day must be practiced.

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Every year the College Board and ACT Inc. receive tens of thousands of requests from parents seeking extended time for their children’s standardized tests. These organizations have a tremendous amount of power and responsibility. They must answer the difficult questions: who truly deserves extended time? How does one create fair and consistent standards to evaluate these myriad requests?
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Tomorrow morning hundreds of thousands of students will sit for the April 1st SAT.

These students will put their faith in a test and a testing process that have come under intense scrutiny in the last few weeks.

By now many of you know the specific details of the College Board’s scoring snafu on the October 8th SAT. According to Pearson Educational Measurement, the company responsible for processing the tests, excessive moisture content compromised the scoring process. Intensive rain increased the moisture content and thickness of the answer sheets, causing the tests to improperly align, and resulting in erroneously low SAT scores for 4,600 high school students, roughly 1% of the 495,000 students who sat for the October test. Not only did this tarnish the reputation of the College Board and damage its credibility, but it also brought into question the very integrity and fairness of the SAT test.
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Almost everyone recognizes that this generation of high school students is working harder than any other in American history. These students have more challenging schedules, more AP and IB classes, more activities, and a greater awareness of the heightened academic stakes. Just try scheduling a tutoring session with some of these students! “I’ll fit you in at 9:00 PM on Tuesday after school, tutorial, lacrosse practice, and your group project meeting.” These young people have tighter schedules than some corporate executives, and many have to work on all burners just to stay on top of it all. Increased academic competition is fundamentally changing the high school experience for many students.
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Although the first SAT test was administered in 1926, if you are looking for the roots of the test, you have to look all the way back to the beginning of the 20th Century to the development of the first standardized intelligence tests. Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, teamed up with French physician Theodore Simon to develop an instrument that would give psychologists and educators the ability to assess mental retardation among French School children. Between 1905 and 1908 Binet and Simon worked in concert to develop an assessment that would allow them to quickly and effectively compare the different levels of psychological and cognitive functioning between people. Using a series of increasingly difficult questions, the Binet-Simon tests were used to measure attention, memory and verbal skills. In 1916, Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman integrated the findings of the Binet-Simon research and released the “Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale” AKA the “Stanford-Binet” IQ test which today is on its 5th revision and remains a popular assessment in the field of Intelligence Testing.
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