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.

So, whether you are a rare coin collector, founder of your school’s history club, tuba player, or editor of the newspaper, your activities alone won’t get you into a top college. It is better, however, for you to be a leader in a few activities and distinguish yourself with a high level of participation in a niched area rather than be a member of tons of clubs but with no discernible passion for one area. Show a genuine commitment rather than just signing up at random for a lot of unconnected activities. In general, an activity such as debate would be better than simply attending a yearbook staff meeting once every few months.

Michele’s book, A is for Admission, was the first one to publicize the Academic Index and explain how Ivy admissions offices use it. Normally that wouldn’t be notable except for the fact that the Ivies publicly denied the existence of the formula for over 40 years! Please realize that the AI does not take into account the crucial subjective factors such as love of learning, teacher recommendations, writing skills, etc., but it will give you a ballpark idea of what your chances of admission are at top colleges. The correspondence between high AI’s and high admission rates is very high. So enter your information and see how you stack up.

2009 will be the most difficult year ever in terms of college admissions! Don’t get lost in the pile of 30,000 applications at some Ivy League schools.

Join this teleseminar and learn insider information from someone who worked inside an Ivy League admissions office. Top college consultant Michele Hernandez and her coauthor of DON’T WORRY, YOU’LL GET IN (Avalon) Mimi Doe, are once again offering to move you through the process with ease and less stress.  This teleseminar will allow you to:

• Conquer the common application with our proven tips and techniques
• Create an Activity Sheet summing up high school awards, activities, and achievements
• 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
• Develop an application strategy to increase college acceptance possibilities

 All of this and more provided by America’s premier college consultant, Michele Hernandez, author of A is For Admission and former Assistant Director of Admissions at Dartmouth College and Mimi Doe, called a “parenting guru” by Ladies Home Journal and author of Busy but Balanced and Nurturing Your Teenager’s Soul who holds a master’s degree in education from Harvard.

The teleseminar includes an in-depth, 90-minute training session on Thursday, September 25th, 7:30pm – 9:00pm (EDT) with Mimi & Michelle on how to give colleges more than they ask for and prepare applications that leverage your experience and strengths.  Click here for more information.

During the four years I worked as an Assistant Director of Admissions at Dartmouth College, I was mystified as to why we were not allowed to speak about the “secret formula” when we printed it on the front of every application folder. Yet when parents asked us if we used a formula, we were instructed to say no. One of the reasons I decided to write A is for Admission was that in my opinion, there were MANY things that Ivy offices kept secret and admissions is NOT supposed to be the CIA. There is no reason why the admissions process shouldn’t be open and honest at every turn. Though the AI is mostly used for recruited athletes, it’s very useful for students to know how to compute their AI to get a rough idea of their admissions odds at top colleges. Though of course it’s not the only factor, academics make up 75% or so of the admissions decision the formula contains mostly academic measures that when combined with recommendations and school endorsements can give students a good idea of where they stand.

Although the Ivy League schools spent many years denying they used any kind of formula, they in fact have been using a ranking formula since the 1950’s called the Academic Index, AI for short. Though it has traditionally been used for sports purposes (maintaining some kind of academic standard on the various athletic teams), every Ivy League school still calculates an AI for every student. Why? Because the average AI of the athletic teams cannot be more than one standard deviation away from the average AI of the entire class, but the only way to know that is to calculate an AI for every student. Naturally since the number was so easy to generate, many schools began to print the number right on the front of every student’s folder and used it to help them rank a student academically. Please understand that the AI is just a statistical tool – it does not take into account a student’s essays, teacher recommendations, outside achievements or awards. It merely chronicles the objective side of the equation, namely high school rank in class and standardized test scores. In short, the AI is a formula that combines the averages of student test scores (both SAT I’s and SAT II’s) and high school rank in class (represented by an Ivy League invention, the converted rank score or CRS). The AI is represented on a scale of 1-240, with 240 being the highest. The approximate average of Ivy applicants is around 200 while the average AI of accepted students is closer to the 211 range.

Every school has a different method of computing rank so figuring out your own CRS may be hard. The most accurate way (and the preferred method) is to have an exact weighted rank. If your school provides rank, use the first part of the CRS input field. Next the formula turns to decile rankings (top 10%, top 20%), but be aware that the formula only approximates the MIDPOINT of the range, so anyone who enters only “top 10%” effectively gets counted as exactly 5% in the class hierarchy. Finally, if neither rank nor decile is available, the formula will take into account a GPA, but often that inflates the CRS and the ranking appears higher.

Obviously admissions offices that use the AI use it along with all the subjective information and make informed decisions about how to understand the most complex part of the formula, the CRS. Why then does the AI matter? Most importantly, it will help you gage your chances for admission since there is a very high correlation between high AI’s and high acceptance rates.

On to the calculator!