In the fall of senior year, students will learn that some of their friends are applying to colleges by November 1 or 15 and finding out whether they are admitted in December. These early application periods are called early decision and early action. It is important for students to be familiar with the similarities and differences of the terms as described below. For both early decision and early action, students should take their final SAT and ACT exams early in the fall of senior year (preferably by October).
Early Decision
Early decision is a binding decision to attend one college made at the time that the student applies. For example, if a student applies to College Z and is accepted early decision, the student has agreed to attend College Z upon receiving the acceptance. For students and families considering early decision, they need to be certain that the college they apply to early decision is the right college for them academically, personally and financially. From a financial perspective, families have to know that regardless of the final financial aid award the student receives (often not provided until spring of the senior year) that they can afford to pay the cost of attendance.
Of note:
A student can only apply to one college early decision.
Early decision can benefit a student who is completely certain of where they want to attend college, but may not be certain of their admittance to that college. Early decision shows the student’s strong commitment to attend a particular college.
Early Action
Early action is a non-binding decision to attend one college made at the time that the student applies. For example, if a student applies to College Z and is accepted early action, the student indicated strong interest in attending College Z upon receiving the acceptance; however, the student has no obligation to attend. Early action provides the opportunity to receive the early peace of mind that early decision provides; however, it does not hold the same commitment for the student.
Of note:
A student can apply to multiple colleges through early action.
Early action benefits students in finding out their acceptances earlier in their senior year without forcing a commitment at that time. Early action shows a student’s strong interest in attending a particular college(s).
Colleges may slightly vary their early decision and early action procedures, so students should review each institution’s process before applying. Remember, it is the student’s right to have clear information and the student’s responsibility to be aware of his/her growing knowledge of college admissions criteria.
Joe Connell has been helping high school students transition to college for the last nine years through positions in admissions, new student orientation and retention. Currently, Joe is the Director of Academic Services & Testing at Dutchess Community College (NY); he has previous work experience at William Paterson University (NJ), Marist College (NY) and Miami University (OH). Joe has presented on issues related to college students' transition and success at both regional and national levels and has taught both SAT preparation and college courses for the past eight years.
The May SAT is nearly upon us, and some of my students recently asked me why they’ve heard that the SAT takes about five hours when the College Board states that it’s only three hours and fifty minutes long. That question, as well as the fact that the test is this weekend, made me think that I should share some last minute tips and information with you.
First of all, the SAT really is a three hour and fifty minute test. The College Board doesn’t sneakily add time to it or anything. But they do give you three five-minute breaks. So there’s an additional fifteen minutes. They also ask that you arrive about an hour early, or by 7:45am. You’ll get checked in and get an assigned seat, and the test center doors close at 8:15. No students are admitted after that, so BE ON TIME! Basically, it’s the test plus all that extra stuff that adds up to about five hours of being at the test site.
During the breaks, you will be allowed to eat and drink, so it’s a good idea to bring snacks and drinks with you. One snack that helps you improve your test scores is chocolate, which is good news for anyone out there who loves the stuff. Supposedly, it’s the flavinoids that make the difference, so if you don’t like chocolate, have some tea, which may have a similar effect.
In the last couple of days before the SAT, do a little bit of sat prep studying, and double check the College Board Checklist to make sure you have everything you’ll need. The night before the test, put out your clothes and supplies for test day and get some good sleep. You want to be organized and well rested so that you can focus and do your best. On test day, eat a good breakfast, get to your test site early, and remember to focus on doing your personal best. Good luck!
Kate Hedman, MSEd, has been helping students succeed on the SAT for seven years. She has been a verbal teacher with ESC for six years, and taught high school English for three years. She loves reading about new advances in brain research that she can use in the classroom to help her students learn how to achieve higher scores on the SAT.
I’ve walked into stores with my wife and she sees a $60 dress but there’s a sign that says there’s a 20% discount on this price. Since I’m a math teacher, she will turn to me and ask what this dress would cost after the discount. Most people will multiply $60 * .20 giving a discount of $12, and then subtract $60 minus $12 yielding the final cost of $48. Absolutely correct – yet, this is not how we at ESC want our students to handle this situation on an SAT test. Ask yourself: If they are reducing the price by 20%, what percent do you pay? Since everything starts at 100%, when you subtract the 20% discount, you actually pay the other 80%. So, just multiply $60 * .80 and you instantly get the final price of $48 (no subtraction necessary since you already subtracted the 20% from 100%).
Now, let’s consider this situation. A woman is earning $60,000 per year but she is getting a promotion and a 20% salary increase. What is her new salary? Similar to the above situation with discounts, we certainly can multiply $60,000 * .20 giving her a salary increase of $12,000 and when we add that to her current salary of $60,000 she will now be getting $72,000. However, once again, there’s a classic SAT strategy. You must always view the current situation as starting at 100% so this additional 20% brings us to 120%. The decimal for 120% is 1.20, so just multiply $60,000 * 1.20 immediately giving the new salary of $72,000.
These strategies are not just useful for the SAT, but they are also great for everyday real-world situations.
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
The Critical Reading section is a great place to guess when you’re not sure of an answer to a question. But how do you know when to guess? Well, the basic rule is to guess when you can eliminate one choice. This applies to the Writing section as well, but apparently not to the Math section, as Marty Rafson explains in his post, Guessing Versus Omitting.
The reason that guessing after eliminating one choice works comes down to the fact that by eliminating just one of the five possible answers, you’re taking the same basic scoring formula that the test-makers use to ensure that random guessing neither statistically harms nor benefits the test-taker, and making it work in your favor. The basic rules for earning points on an SAT state that one point is added to your raw score when you answer a question correctly, and ¼ of a point is deducted from your raw score when you answer a question incorrectly. Each question has five possible answer choices, so a random guesser would end up neither gaining nor losing any points. He would get 1 of every 5 of the questions correct, adding a point for that correct answer and subtracting ¼ of a point for each of the four incorrect answers. That’s a net gain of zero points! Because leaving questions blank doesn’t affect an SAT score one way or the other, it makes no statistical sense to guess randomly! If, on the other hand, you can eliminate at least one of the answer choices, everything changes.
If, instead of five possible answers, each question only had four, then a student guessing on four questions would, statistically, get one of those correct. So he would now add a point to his score. He’d also get three wrong, subtracting ¼ of a point each. But now, instead of a net gain of zero, there is a net gain of ¼ of a point! Wow! Just by eliminating one answer on each question, this test-taker earned ¼ of a point! If that test-taker guessed on the entire Critical Reading section with its 67 questions, that would equal a rounded raw score of four! Not too impressive, but it’s better than zero. In any case, there is probably no situation in which anyone would take their guessing to that extreme.
Process of elimination is a valuable tool to use on the Critical Reading and Writing sections whenever you are not sure of an answer. And the guessing formula is something to keep in mind whenever you are not sure of the answer to a question. The more answers you can eliminate, the better your odds. So gamble against the test-makers and take a guess if you can eliminate at least one choice – the odds are in your favor!
Kate Hedman, MSEd, has been helping students succeed on the SAT for seven years. She has been a verbal teacher with ESC for six years, and taught high school English for three years. She loves reading about new advances in brain research that she can use in the classroom to help her students learn how to achieve higher scores on the SAT.
The Educational Testing Service has cleverly figured out that students are not sufficiently familiar with the topic of percent of change. Consider this simple problem:
A store owner raises the price of an item from $40 to $50. By what percent did he increase the price? There is a formula that every student must know for the SAT:
Percent of Change = (Change/Original) * 100
In the case of this problem, the price increased by $10, so that’s the change. The classic question that students always have trouble with is whether to put that $10 over the $40 or over the $50. It’s always over the ORIGINAL. Thus, we put 10/40 = .25 * 100 giving us 25%. Then, there’s an interesting follow-up that has appeared on past SAT tests. Suppose this store owner now decides to be nice and bring the price back down to $40. Well, if he had raised the price by 25% surely he must now be lowering the price by the same 25%, right? Wrong!!! Let’s go back to our formula. He is now dropping the price by the same $10 but now the “original” price at the start of the new problem is $50. Therefore, we must put 10/50 this time, giving us .2 * 100, or a 20% decrease in price. Fascinating!
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
Every student would like to find a “pure” solution to every problem. However, as SAT math questions get harder, it becomes virtually impossible to find this pure mathematical solution. If you can’t solve the problem outright, what should you do? Train yourself to try the choices.
Consider this problem:
A calculator company finds that 2% of all its calculators are defective. In a certain shipment, 16 defective calculators were found. How many calculators were in this shipment?
(A) .32 (B) 8 (C) 80 (D) 800 (E) 8000
If you can’t solve this directly, look at the choices. SAT choices are always arranged in order, usually ascending from left to right. A good strategy is to try choice C first, since it is the “middle-sized” choice. Try .02 * 80 = 1.6. This tells you that your choice was too small. Therefore, next try choice D and do .02 * 800 giving you exactly 16 proving choice D was right. Whenever you defeat an SAT question with a strategy like trying the choices, you might in the back of your mind wonder what the pure solution was (although, you got the same one point for bubbling in choice D). Here, one method of solution would have been to write and solve the equation .02x=16 and division by .02 gives x=800.
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
The New York Times recently published an article called Test-Takers’ Rights, providing a useful outline of some of the things that are required in a testing environment. Reading it should help prepare you in case something goes wrong.
To clarify the last point on their page – you can get your scores cancelled if you choose to. The article mentions that “best you can hope for is a refund or a free retake.” The refund or retake is in addition to your scores being cancelled, which the College Board will do for you if you ask them by the Wednesday after the test.
Kate Hedman, MSEd, has been helping students succeed on the SAT for seven years. She has been a verbal teacher with ESC for six years, and taught high school English for three years. She loves reading about new advances in brain research that she can use in the classroom to help her students learn how to achieve higher scores on the SAT.
When the Educational Testing Service created the “grid-in” questions they faced a new dilemma. While every other question on the math, reading and writing sections was a 5-choice question carrying a ¼ point penalty for a wrong response, what should the penalty be for an incorrect answer to a grid-in question? The penalty for a wrong answer is a deterrent to guessing. What would a student’s chances be of randomly guessing the answer to a grid-in question? With no choices to select from, the probability of guessing the right answer is virtually zero. Thus, it was decided that there is no penalty for an incorrect answer to a grid-in question. Of course, if a student gets a question wrong, he doesn’t get the one point he would have gotten for answering it correctly. However, if a student can’t determine the answer, absolutely go ahead and guess freely, since there is truly no penalty. The grid-ins are scored by just counting how many of these 10 questions you get right and no deduction for the wrong ones. Furthermore, even if you don’t get to finish the last, toughest grid-ins like #17 and #18, just fill in your favorite number. In fact, even if the proctor says to stop working on that section, while you can’t go back and solve the problems later, you can at any time fill in your favorite guess for any grid-in problem that you hadn’t gotten to before being told to put your pencil down.
Marty Rafson wrote the ESC math curriculum and has been an SAT math teacher, tutor, and curriculum developer for 30 years. He has been a high school math teacher for 36 years and a math department chairman for 25 years. He was also an adjunct professor at City College of New York School of Education.
Most, and probably all, people have had the experience of having to do something about which they are anxious. For many of us, public speaking is a very frightening thing. For others, getting on a plane is scary. For me, waiting to be picked for a team in gym class may have been the most terrifying repeated experience I have ever had to go through. But what about sitting for exams? Are people afraid of that? The answer is a resounding yes. That familiar sweaty-palmed, heart-racing sensation and desire to run out of the room screaming can creep up on many of the most otherwise calm and collected students when faced with the prospect of sitting for an important exam. In small amounts, anxiety during study time and on test day may actually help students’ performance on tests. But if it gets to be too great, anxiety can really wreak havoc on a test-taker’s ability to concentrate and do his or her best. When it looks like it’s going to affect your test scores in a negative way, that’s when we need to take steps to alleviate it.
People who tend to be perfectionists tend to experience more test anxiety than others. So do students who go into a test unprepared, but care about doing well. If you are going to take the SAT and are afraid that you may be in the second group, then taking an SAT prep course may be a good idea for you. If you are prepared, you eliminate the cause of your anxiety. If you are in the perfectionist group, the SAT prep class can also help you on your struggle toward perfection, but you may need a little extra help to stay calm on test day. For that, you might like to try some breathing exercises (take a look at the video below this post).
Test anxiety is a very common occurrence, but you don’t have to let it get in the way of your doing your best on the SAT. Learn some deep breathing, study a lot, and get a good night’s sleep the night before and a good breakfast the day of the test. You will be fine. Good luck!
Kate Hedman, MSEd, has been helping students succeed on the SAT for seven years. She has been a verbal teacher with ESC for six years, and taught high school English for three years. She loves reading about new advances in brain research that she can use in the classroom to help her students learn how to achieve higher scores on the SAT.
Last time, we covered the SAT testing environment. This time, we are going to talk about your proctor.
If you are familiar with the environment, bring the required materials, and have practiced taking the SAT so you know pretty much what will be on it, then the only variable you have left to contend with is the identity of the proctor. While there are some horror stories, including a wonderfully awful one in the New York Times about a proctor who arranged flowers and talked on the phone, most proctors know what they’re doing. If, by any chance, you find your proctor acting bizarrely, then make sure you speak up soon after the test; remember, as mentioned in the last article, the College Board can cancel your scores if you ask them to do it by the Wednesday after test day.
Kate Hedman, MSEd, has been helping students succeed on the SAT for seven years. She has been a verbal teacher with ESC for six years, and taught high school English for three years. She loves reading about new advances in brain research that she can use in the classroom to help her students learn how to achieve higher scores on the SAT.
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