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.

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.

We urge our students to send scores that are strong even to those score optional schools to which they apply. For students who do not have scores they wish to send, there are a good number of excellent schools across the country that do not penalize you for submitting an application without standardized test results. We just want to give you a complete picture of the score optional scenario – warts and all. Jay Matthews, a reporter for the Washington Post wrote an interesting piece about the topic: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2009/07/what_the_sat-optional_colleges.html. But, then again, the Washington Post owns Kaplan – one of the largest test tutoring companies. So, was Mr. Matthews incentivized to bash anyone who dared to do away with Kaplan’s bread and butter? One’s mind spins.

The following is an abridged version of the list of SAT score optional schools compiled by the FairTest website. This list includes accredited, bachelor-degree granting colleges and universities that de-emphasize the use of standardized tests by making admissions decisions about substantial numbers of applicants who recently graduated from US high schools without using the SAT or ACT. See http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/OptionalPDFHardCopy.pdf for a full list SAT score optional schools.

Bard College                                                        Ohio State Universities
Bates College                                                      Oregon State University – Corvallis
Bowdoin College                                               Pitzer College
College of the Atlantic                                    Rollins College
Concordia University                                     Smith College
California State Universities                        South Dakota State University
Denison University                                          Susquehanna University
Dickinson College                                             Texas A&M
Drew University                                                University of Alaska
Franklin and Marshall College                     University of Arkansas
George Mason University                              University of Idaho at Moscow
Gettysburg College                                           University of Kansas at Lawrence
Goddard College                                                University of Maine
Goucher College                                                 University of Minnesota
Hampshire College                                            University of Mississippi
Hobart and William Smith Colleges           University of Montana
Kansas State University                                  University of Nebraska
Knox College                                                        University of Nevada at Las Vegas and Reno
Lake Forest College                                           University of Texas
Lewis and Clark College                                   Ursinus College
Middlebury College                                           Wake Forest University
Mount Holyoke                                                   Washington College
Muhlenberg College                                          Western Kentucky University
Nazareth College                                                Wheaton College
New School                                                           Wittenberg University
Northern Arizona University                       Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)

College essays are an unusual genre: they are intensely personal, but have specific purpose and a specific audience. Your goal is to express who you are, but in a way that tells colleges that you are a good fit for them intellectually, emotionally, ethically, and otherwise. The essay must also convey your ability to write and think clearly.

The Common Application Personal Essay is the most important essay you will write. College is about academics, so make this essay about your scholarly focus and offer the reader a sense of what you’re going to bring to the classroom. If you write about how you like to help save sea turtles or read all of Jane Austen, that’s fine and it speaks well of you. But a conversation about merely liking turtles or being obsessed with Jane Austen can only go so far. No one cares if you’re in love with Mr. Darcy—Mr. Darcy isn’t reading your application. But if you bolster your essay with descriptions of the research you’ve done on ocean pollution or on the ways that Jane Austen’s work affected notions of romance and social graces in her time and in our own, then you’ve presented something that can spur curiosity and interest from an admissions officer.

Also, spend some time working on your opening line – it matters! You want a hook that grabs the reader’s attention.

BAD HOOKS:

• I had no idea how poor people in Africa were until saw them when I went on safari in Kenya last summer.
• College holds vast potentialities for the optimization of my intellect and ability to succeed in the personal financial arena.
• I was up late last night trying to figure out what to write for my college essay when the idea finally hit me!
• Like Proust and his madeline, I remember the day I found my passion for molecular biology.
• I didn’t think I’d ever make the squash team.

GOOD HOOKS:

• I am my own favorite fictional character.
• Every October, the dry winds arrive, the sky clears, and at night the hills above my house cut a black profile against the stars.
• I first got into politics the day the cafeteria outlawed creamed corn.
• Every afternoon my bike ride from school to work takes me past the remains of the steel mill, which shut down two years before I was born.
• Anyone who says you can’t iron shirts and read a book at the same time hasn’t tried hard enough at either.

Some schools, however, will accept the ACT with Writing in lieu of SAT Subject Tests.

We think that taking the ACT with Writing benefits the majority of applicants. Since the colleges will take your highest scores on either the SAT I or the ACT with Writing, you can let them choose your best score. Also, it can offset a weaker writing SAT I score if you take the writing section of the ACT with Writing. Since the ACT with Writing is a bit less aptitude-oriented, some students do better on it than on the SAT I. Plus, it’s shorter than the SAT I so those who have trouble concentrating for four hours have an alternative.

There is no guessing penalty, which means you can fill in every answer instead of figuring out which ones to leave blank.

Some colleges (you have to check each one individually) will accept the ACT with Writing in lieu of SAT Subject Tests, so that is often a very convenient option. In short, you have very little to lose, but could have a lot to gain by taking the ACT with Writing.

Amherst https://www.amherst.edu/admission/mttg/student_blogs

Bates http://www.bates.edu/bateslife.xml

Brandeis http://www.brandeis.edu/admissions/blog/

Brown http://blogs.brown.edu/admissions/

California Institute of Technology http://www.caltech.typepad.com/

Carleton http://apps.carleton.edu/admissions/blogs/

Carnegie Mellon http://www.enrollment.cmu.edu/admission/blogs/

Case http://blog.case.edu/admission/

Claremont McKenna http://cmc.edu/admission/blogs1.php

Connecticut College http://outoftheblue.conncoll.edu/2011-spring-p.html

Cornell http://blogs.cornell.edu/admissions/

Dartmouth http://dartmouthperspectives.blogspot.com/

Davidson http://forum.davidson.edu/explore/

Emory http://www.emory.edu/admission/about_emory/student_and_faculty_blogs.html

Grinnell http://www.grinnell.edu/admission/voices

Hamilton http://www.hamilton.edu/journals

Harvey Mudd http://www.hmc.edu/admission1/whymudd1/community.html

Haverford http://www.haverford.edu/admission/blog-profiles.php

Holy Cross http://admissions.me.holycross.edu/

Johns Hopkins http://blogs.hopkins-interactive.com/

Julliard http://blog.juilliard.edu/

Lafayette http://voices.lafayette.edu/

Lehigh http://lehighadmissions1.blogspot.com/

Middlebury http://blogs.middlebury.edu/seniorfellows/

MIT http://www.mitadmissions.org/blogs.shtml

Northeastern http://www.northeastern.edu/admissions/campuslife/studentblogs.html

NYU http://blogs.nyu.edu/admissions/ambassadors/

Pitzer http://www.admission-unpeeled.blogspot.com/

Princeton http://blogs.princeton.edu/paw/2011/02/early_admission.html

Rhode Island School of Design http://welcome.risd.edu/

Rhodes http://connect.rhodes.edu/blog/admissions-office/

Rice http://admission.blogs.rice.edu/

Sarah Lawrence http://www.slc.edu/magazine/hardway/index.html

Smith http://www.smith.edu/admission/blog/prod/

Southern Methodist http://www.smu.edu/Admission/ConnectWithUs.aspx

Swarthmore http://www.swarthmore.edu/x15365.xml

Tufts http://tuftsblogs.com/freshmanperspective/

UCLA http://blog.admissions.ucla.edu/

UNC http://unc-admissions.blogspot.com/

University of Chicago https://blogs.uchicago.edu/collegeadmissions/

University of Colorado http://admissions.colorado.edu/undergraduate/blogs/heatherk

University of Oregon http://music.uoregon.edu/admission/welcome.htm

UVA http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/

UVM http://adms.blog.uvm.edu/

Vanderbilt http://admissions.vanderbilt.edu/vandybloggers/

Vassar http://blogs.vassar.edu/admissions/

Wake Forest http://rethinkingadmissions.blogs.wfu.edu/

Wellesley http://web.wellesley.edu/web/Admission/GetToKnowUs/studentblogs.psml

Wesleyan http://newsletter.blogs.wesleyan.edu/

As part of your research, check out the college newspaper. It can give you a snapshot of what life at that college will be like, current issues on campus, etc. http://dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/College_and_University/Newspapers/By_Region/U_S__States/