http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57368736/colleges-fake-sat-scores-lead-to-admins-ouster/

Finally, in addition to proving your rigor of course load and giving you a nice honor to add to your Common Application, performing well on AP tests in a specific academic area can back up your honed academic focus. For example, if you want to present yourself as a budding psychologist on your applications, taking AP Statistics and AP Psychology would certainly help to back up that interest.

Even if your school does not offer AP classes, any high school can order AP tests for students – but you have to ask ahead of time, in January or February, as schools must order by March. If for some reason your school refuses to order a test for you, you can also take AP tests at a neighboring public high school as long as you order them ahead of time. Remember that colleges only see AP tests from junior year and before since the results come back in July and the tests are only offered in May. That means you want to front-load AP tests, taking as many as you can prior to senior year.

An article last year in USA Today noted that AP scores of students from around the country are dropping. Despite the fact that students are taking nearly three times as many AP exams as they used to (from 1.1 million in 1999 to 2.9 million in 2009), the failure rate (students scoring a 1 or 2) has risen by over 5% in the same time period.

Nearly half of all students in the United States who take the AP exam are failing – therefore, nearly half of all students in the United States are not gaining even the most elementary level of knowledge necessary to compete at the university level and beyond. This gives you an opportunity to be in the other half of students to show your level of expertise along with rigor of course load.

What’s the average AP score at your high school for specific tests? Find out. Read your high school profile, which is sent with your transcript to colleges when you apply. If you don’t think your AP class is preparing you for the AP test or your school doesn’t even offer AP classes, take matters into your own hands and self-study for the tests. There are plenty of resources available to do so. MIT OpenCourseWare, for instance, offers free online classes in physics, biology and chemistry. Some additional test prep website resources are CollegeBoard’s APCentral, SparkNotes and McGraw-Hill.

If you live in California, UC College Prep offers free self-study AP courses:

http://www.uccp.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56&Itemid=78

KahnAcademy offers no cost AP test prep videos in courses such as Calculus, Biology and Physics. There are AP test prep books galore as well as AP textbooks corresponding to AP classes.

When more and more students are performing poorly on their AP exams, your strong AP scores will help you stand out. The earlier you start preparing for your AP exams and using all of the tools available to you, the more likely it is that your scores will improve the quality of your application.

Some interesting facts about AP Tests:

• As of this year, guessing is encouraged if you are unsure of an answer. The quarter-point penalty for a wrong answer has been eliminated, so experts are advising students to play the odds.
• Foreign language AP exams are often broken up into a “language” test and a “literature” test. The former tests knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, the latter tests understanding of literary texts (such as Don Quixote for Spanish Literature). The literature tests are considered more difficult and somewhat less common but don’t shy away from them.
• Some exams have different levels: Calculus BC is higher than Calculus AB; Physics C is higher than Physics B. If you take the higher level AP, the lower level will usually not count for any additional credit in colleges although you may gain additional grounds for AP award eligibility.
• AP Exam Dates: http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/cal/cal2.html
• You can suppress a low AP test so there is NO risk to taking one you are unsure of. In fact, this past year many of students reported that they were allowed to first SEE their score and THEN cancel it – but in either case, you can suppress a 1 or a 2.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions recently from readers who were deferred in the early round and unclear about what to do going forward. We’ve shared below the deferral plan we suggest, beginning in January when students hear from early colleges.

If you were deferred from your early school, take a deep breath and take action as you must be proactive. If you simply do nothing, chances are you will not get in. Here’s a plan:

January

• Focus on your grades! The biggest reason for a deferral is mediocre grades senior fall – cut out your extras and focus on GRADES. All A’s will help.
• Retake the SAT or SAT Subject Tests on January 28th if that was a problem area (you can always go standby if you’ve not yet registered). If you don’t do better, just don’t send the new scores and no one will see them. If you do better, RUSH them to all your schools.
• Are there any awards or competitions you can enter or have won and not yet reported to the college? Any concrete accomplishment will be brought up down the line.
• Have you followed up with any professors at the college that you had spoken to? Let them know your plight and enlist their help.
• Call (or email) the admissions office a few days after you receive the deferral letter and speak with your admissions officer – the person who covers your area or who you interviewed with or if you are a minority student, the minority representative. Tell him or her how disappointed you are, how much you like the school, and ask what else you can do. LISTEN to any clues he or she might give you in the conversation. It’s important YOU make this call NOT your parents. We had one student discover that by not visiting her early school she was at a disadvantage. She immediately made plans to visit.
• Ask your guidance counselor to call both to support you, and to find out anything about WHY – any missing items? Tough year? Huge rise in applicants? School support is critical.
• Ask a senior year teacher to write you a letter of support.
• If you happen to know the headmaster/principal of your current school well, you can ask him/her to call or write on your behalf.

February
By the last week in February, you want to write a “deferral letter” stressing the following info:

• Anything NEW — grades, scores, awards, prizes, etc… — Since my deferral, I … (Don’t waste space with insignificant achievements as that would only weaken your case.)
• Have your school send your updated transcript including all new grades.
• Any interesting extracurricular additions, achievements, etc…
• Anything else that is interesting you didn’t mention elsewhere.
• An impassioned paragraph on WHY the school is still your first choice – summarize and stress WHAT YOU WOULD ADD to the college campus.
• Don’t forget to use the heading you used on all of your essays which includes your DOB, Name, High School and SS #.

March
In early March, CALL again and speak to your regional admissions officer to touch base, ask if he/she got the letter, stress how it’s your first choice, and mention a few notable accomplishments (I pulled my grades up to all A’s and had the best quarter of my high school career…). You can email if they do not accept calls.

Some final advice:

• If you have any strings to pull, now is the time to pull them.
• While we want you to advocate for yourself, don’t become a pest. You don’t want to stalk the admission office.
• Don’t let this deferral erode your confidence. Keep focused and remember that the odds these past few years have been at all time lows and you stood out enough not to be rejected.

Please know we are here to offer you our insight, guidance, and resources for this all important time in your lives.

Be well, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

December 9th
3:00PM EST
Dartmouth College

5:00 PM EST
University of Pennsylvania

December 13th
5:00PM EST
Brown University

December 15th
5:00 PM EST
Harvard University
New York University

This event will feature the same content as our October seminar, brought back by popular demand for students finishing regular round applications. You can join this teleseminar from the comfort of your own home simply calling in.

U.S. News Presents “Create Winning Applications” Teleseminar by Application Boot Camp®

MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2011
7:30-9:00 PM ET
Registration is now open.

This teleseminar will give you crucial tips for leveraging the Common Application and setting yourself apart, all before applications are due in January. For the fee of admission to this virtual event, you will:

• Conquer the Common Application with our proven techniques.
• Create an Activity Sheet summing up high school awards, activities, and achievements. Once you sign up, you will immediately receive tips for writing your own Activity Sheet as well as samples.
• Learn how to prepare multiple essays (including all required essays along with extra essays) that can be used for specific colleges using the Application Boot Camp® strategy.
• Email your questions to Mimi and Michele and get them answered live.
• Receive an audio copy of the event (MP3) and a copy of the transcript so you can refer back to it as you complete your applications.
• Receive a bonus gift:  Mysteries of the Common Application Revealed.
  
• As an added benefit to the teleseminar, U.S.News & World Report is offering you a special 25% discount on the U.S. News College Compass and the 2012 Best Colleges Guidebook.

The regular round will be brutal this year with early applications at an all-time high.  But, don’t panic, we are here to help. We are eager to connect with you on December 19^th and help you rise above the rest with winning applications.

You can purchase admission to this virtual event on our website, here. Any questions, contact Lauren at Lauren@ApplicationBootCamp.com or 781.530.7088.

When we asked the administrators of the Common Application for a recorded interview to answer student’s questions, they denied our requests. Scott Anderson, Director of Outreach, did finally answer our many emails with the following: “Students can find detailed instructions on how to create alternate versions of their application in the ‘Application Versions’ section of the main instructions page.” For all follow up questions, his response was, “Again, I will direct you to the instructions regarding alternate versions.” Helpful? Nope! The “detailed instructions” make us dizzy.

The Common Application’s values are “integrity, equity, reliability, access, service.” We would like to add to that “confusion.”

While working with our students, we always instruct them to customize their application to the specific school to which they are applying so they can ensure that they are showing WHY they specifically want to attend that school. The Common Application does not make that easy. They encourage students to dutifully follow their guidelines and submit one Common Application to all of your schools. We reject this approach. Fortunately, you can create up to 10 different versions. The Common Application does not want you to do this, so it makes it difficult. Some students make different versions if they decide to write a new essay or want to add an accomplishment.  Some students will send entirely different essays to different schools, especially if school-specific supplements compel them to mix-and-match. (For instance, you might write a great ‘in the nation’s service’ supplement for Princeton that then becomes your main essay for other schools.) The only catch is that the Common Application lets you make only 10 versions (it was 20 in previous years).

Check out the Common Application’s online tutorial here for a step-by-step guide.

Choosing a college solely based on its overall US News and World Report ranking is often misleading. Sure, US News has spent a lot of time devising a precise formula for what they believe are the most important factors on which to evaluate a school. You can read an extended version of their methodology here, but essentially, they use a formula that “uses quantitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality, and it’s based on [their] researched view of what matters in education.” They separate colleges by their mission and their region, then evaluate them on sixteen indicators of academic excellence, including assessment by administrators at peer institutions, retention of students, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, and alumni giving. We’re sure you can agree that, while a school may rank highly based on high scores in each category, whether or not alumni give to the school is likely not going to tell you whether that school has a fabulous planetary science program, with the most distinguished professor in the country in the area of Martian cratering studies. Going with our planetary science example, a student might originally be gung-ho, dead set on attending this year’s number one ranked schools, Harvard or Princeton. If that same student is passionate about planetary and earth sciences, they may not realize that the number one ranked school in that academic discipline including graduate studies is actually the California Institute of Technology; Harvard is ranked #8 in that discipline, and Princeton #9. (http://www.usnewsuniversitydirectory.com/graduate-schools/sciences/earth-sciences.aspx).

How can you check? First, it’s often helpful to consult the graduate rankings in a publication like US News and World Report, although keep in mind that sometimes graduate programs and faculty are separate from the undergraduate, sometimes shared. Once you have that list, comb the web sites, course guides and published info from colleges to see if they are strong in your area(s) of interest. Finally, call the school or visit and speak to professors, visit the library, check out the holdings—in short, make an INFORMED decision about where you are applying and why.