Mom Behind the Curtain

every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard

SAT – 6 Best Tools to Improve your SAT Scores without a Private Tutor

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SAT tools to improve scoreIf you’re like a lot of high school students (or their parents), around this time of year you’re probably worrying about how you can improve your SAT score. If you’ve been following my blog, you know I’ve been questioning the worth of a lot of the standard advice you’re given for improving your chances of getting into college and being successful, but one thing I’ve found is that good SAT or ACT scores are still definitely important for college admission. This is one place that it’s still definitely worth your time to put in some effort. (For a information on schools that will even give you a full ride scholarship based on your SAT score, see the post What ACT or SAT Score Can Get You a Full-Ride Scholarship? by My Kid’s College Choice.)

I’m still working on setting up my blog specific to high school, college, and success, but my son just finished studying for the PSAT, which he took yesterday. (For the difference between the SAT and the PSAT, see What is the PSAT on DIY College Rankings.) His scores were already high, but even with private tutoring he’d reached a limit in his improvement. He was frustrated, so I did a lot of research into how to improve your SAT scores. And he did improve. To the point that he was capable of even perfect scores on practice sections. (In case you’re wondering, I was a National Merit Scholar, back in the day. 🙂 But we didn’t even consider him prepping for National Merit Scholar level until his practice test his sophomore year showed him to be within reach of the qualifying score.)

However, the more I dug into it, I realized that the quest for National Merit recognition now is like trying to get Olympic Gold. In the Olympics, all of the athletes have the skills, and top competitors are separated by fractions of a second. Different athletes will win on different days and some will crumble under the pressure. Same goes for the PSAT. It will be interesting to see if the new format of the PSAT has any effect.

But, if your quest is for high SAT scores or to raise your SAT score, it’s at least not a one day shot. And all your efforts studying for the PSAT will pay off when you take the SAT later….

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Back to School – High School anxiety

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If the appearance of “Back to School” aisles in July gave you heart palpitations, you might be wondering if all the stress accompanying what we call “high school” today is worth it. And if you — as a parent — are feeling this way, what do you think your kids are feeling? When did high school get so stressful for parents anyway?

For the summer I’ve taken a break from my series on high school, college, and success to focus on some summer fun and trip preparation. When I spy the back to school sections at the store, I avoid them as much as possible. It’s supposed to be the middle of summer, people! (Although I have to admit that we have already gotten the kids’ new backpacks for next year.)

But Amanda Valentine of Reads4Tweens forwarded me an article by William Deresiewicz on his thoughts about an Ivy League education, Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies.

And here I thought it was just lack of sleep caused by an over-abundance of homework and extra-curricular “fun” activities….

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Success factors 10: Teen stress and anxiety, are ambitious high school schedules leading to success?

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School used to be so easy. Take the hardest classes possible. Do your best. Success will follow.

But have high schools (and the college boards who wrote up the advanced placement curriculum) succeeded in making advanced placement classes so challenging that a student can’t do it all? Or are they just leading to teen stress and anxiety with little to no affect on life-long success?…

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Success Factors 9: Are AP classes a good measure for school ratings?

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As I’ve outlined in my previous posts, I’ve been pondering how to guide our kids to the best path of success, starting in high school by analyzing success factors. One answer might be that you try to move into a school district according to the high school ratings. Our school ranks well in U.S. News 2014 Best High Schools Rankings, but what does this mean? 

I started thinking about this when we noticed that high school kids at our school seemed to have over-whelming schedules and then noted our own experiences with a full schedules of preAP and AP classes.

Smartest Kids in the WorldIn my last post, I gave a quick rundown of my take on The Smartest Kids in the World: and how they got that way, by Amanda Ripley.

What I took from that was that was that based on the studies of Finland and Poland’s educational systems, stress, test, and retest might not be necessary for success. And South Korea’s school system shows that a high stress and test environment has some definite drawbacks.

So I was surprised that when I started reading Amanda Ripley’s blog, I kept running into statistics that used AP tests as a measure of whether of a high school was an academic success. She seems to agree with using AP tests as a way to determine school ratings….

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Success Factors 8: Test and Retest and High Stress, the best way?

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As I’ve outlined in my previous posts, I was pondering how to guide our kids to the best path of success, starting in high school by analyzing what the success factors are. We’ve tried both a partial load of preAP/AP classes and a full load of preAP/AP classes. Our personal experience has been that both ways have their own drawbacks.

Smartest Kids in the WorldThen I came across, The Smartest Kids in the World: and how they got that way, by Amanda Ripley.

Of course, everyone would like to think that their kid is the smartest kid in the world,:) even if they don’t want to admit it. But that’s not really what this book is about. It’s an unfortunate title, because it might make most parents think that the book has nothing to offer for their “average smart” kids let alone their “average” kids, but it does….

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Success factors 7: High school advice, does high school stress lead to success?

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For lots of reasons that I went over in some of my previous posts, we started questioning if our kid should be taking a full load of AP classes starting with this first post. We were wondering if a success factor in high school was taking a full AP load. So I continued asking more questions about AP classes and class rank at our school. Here are some of the things I learned.

Like a lot of schools, our students have essentially two GPAs.

The first is a straight GPA. Just an average of all your grades in all your classes.

Then they have another adjusted GPA that is used for their class rank, and they get extra points for preAP and AP classes. This means that even if you make a lower grade in a preAP or AP class, the grade used to compute you average is likely to be higher than you could possibly get in a ‘regular’ class. This makes sense, since it seems to avoid penalizing kids for taking harder classes. We’ll call their adjusted GPA, using this extra bump for harder classes, their class rank average.…

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Success factors 6: Is there a connection between AP courses, reading, and SAT scores?

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AP classes and SAT scores can both be thought of as measurements of success factors for high school. But does one have an affect on the other?

As I mentioned my last post, we noticed a couple of things about our school district that indicated that our school was not preparing students as well as it could to take the SAT and the PSAT. So I started trying to figure out why. Not that I think the SAT is a perfect measure for learning, but it seemed like the level of achievement should at least stay the same….

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Success factors 5: Should you take the high school advice to take all the AP courses you possible can?

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So after deciding that we thought the full advanced placement courses class load was a treadmill to no-where that was increasing in speed, we started out with recommending our kids take partial AP loads. But, we found that our kids weren’t getting as much out of their classes. Maybe the path the school was recommending for top students – a full AP load – was the right one after all.

The problem is that the standard advice – given by all high schools – is to take as many preAP/AP courses as you possibly can. This means that most of the serious students are in the preAP/AP classes….

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Success factors 4: Is the answer a full load of advanced placement courses?

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In past posts about success factors, I talked about when my kids were still young I learned that taking a full load of advanced placement classes at a moderately competitive high school means ridiculous homework loads. I started wondering if there was a better way for success, and noted some information such as that can be found on the blog, Study Hacks. So we decided that maybe the answer was just to not take a full load of advanced placement courses.

So through our start of middle school, taking only a partial load of preAP classes seemed to be turning out pretty well. …

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Success factors: High school rankings released by U.S. News: What do they mean?

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U.S. News released its 2014 best high schools rankings this week.

You can see if your high school ranked here: U.S. News National Rankings Best High Schools.

Our own local high school is ranked, and moved up well in the rankings, but what does it mean?…

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