College Blog
You might be wondering, “what does grade inflation have to do with AP exams?” […] In a world where average GPAs have steadily climbed to rest in the high A- territory (~3.7), colleges see AP exam scores as providing more context and nuance. This is doubly true if your student does not submit an SAT score (or applies to a school that does not accept SAT scores, like the UCs).
When you visit a college, there is so much more to do than just show up for your tour and walk around the campus. In order to make the most of a visit that frequently involves a hotel stay and a plane flight, it’s critical that your student do the legwork before the tour in order to make the most of the half-day you will spend on campus.
Make sure that you know the basic statistics, or have the research easily accessible on a phone or in a notebook, so that you don’t ask those questions during your time on campus. Keep your attention on the higher-value questions that you can’t get answers to on the website.
You did it! Your family got to the other side of the application deadlines, and you survived! But now, if you applied early action or early decision anywhere, then decisions have begun rolling in. And while a deferral may be disappointing, it’s worth remembering that a deferral is not a no! Here, we’ll unpack the difference between a deferral and a waitlist, how deferrals and waitlists work, and where you should go from here.
Which prompt you pick matters less than the story you choose to tell and how you tell it. When you begin to get ready to write, you should employ a process that begins with understanding the questions being asked. Turn over all your cards. For some people that involves brainstorming, for others it doesn’t. Whether you brainstorm or not, write with no regard for length; just get all the ideas on paper. Then organize the parts of the story that are really important or the parts that came out well, and begin trimming irrelevant content, shortening sentences and fixing verbs, getting rid of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. At the end of the process, you should have an essay that tells the reader something about you. It should be a story that no one else could tell but you. And hopefully the writing sounds like you—a polished version of you, a you in a suit-and-tie or blouse-and-blazer, but you nonetheless.
