If you think that college is getting harder and harder for students to get into every day, then you’re right. The Baby Boom generation’s children are all grown up and ready to leave the nest, and as a result there has never been a larger application pool than there is now. Top schools are upping their selectivity drastically, and stories of valedictorians and team captains getting rejected from their top choices are everywhere. Students who want to get into the schools of their choice have to set themselves apart in any way they can. Fortunately, for those who prepare in advance, knowledge of this increased competition can be an enormous advantage. 

There will be over a million more applicants to college in 2008 than there were in 2000, and as a result admissions are down across the board. The top ten schools in America have cut their acceptance rates by 1-3 percent in only a few years, and schools further down the bracket have axed their acceptance rates much more drastically than that. Spots at Ivy League universities are becoming increasingly scarce, and schools that used to be considered safety schools are now extremely competitive (USC, for instance, which only 8 years ago wasn’t even in the top 50 on the list of America’s top colleges, is now extremely exclusive, with an acceptance rate half as high as it was less than a decade ago).  Same school, just a whole lot more applicants. Yet anyone who want to get their child into a premier college can do so in one relatively easy step: thoroughly preparing their child for standardized testing.

Standardized tests exist for a reason: each school has a slightly different grading system - some have rampant grade inflation while others are very tough on their own students - and so colleges therefore have no idea what a student’s average really means. A 3.3 could be laughably bad at one school and extremely impressive at a school the next town over. Standardized tests provide a reliable measure of a student’s reasoning, problem solving, mathematical, and verbal abilities. Plenty of students have gotten into the college of their choice with sub-par grades but fantastic test scores.  

There’s a loophole in all of this. Standardized tests don’t test students on their native abilities: they test them on how good they are at taking standardized tests. A poor math student who truly devotes himself to learning the tricks of the SAT can score a perfect 800 on the math section through diligent effort. If a student attempts to take a standardized test without first familiarizing him or herself with the tricks and intricacies of that test is putting him or herself at an ENORMOUS disadvantage. If you took a good athlete and asked him to run a marathon without training for it first, how would he do? In all likelihood, he would do terribly. But by training consistently, he would eventually be able to run it in an impressively short time. Standardized tests are the same way. No matter how smart a student is, he or she will simply not be able to score well on a test without first dissecting the test and learning how to approach it. I’ve known A+ students with embarrassingly low SAT scores, and C students who have achieved nearly perfect scores on all three sections of the test.  

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that SAT scores aren’t important - they’re becoming more important every day, and a standout score can make all the difference in deciding the future educational opportunities that your child will have. The earlier you get started prepping your child for standardized testing, the higher they will score. Prepping thoroughly for standardized tests is one of the only guarantees you can give yourself that your child will get into the school of his or her dreams.

In any conversation about college admissions, it’s almost impossible not to hear the following phrase: “Colleges are looking for well-rounded students.”  Yet if you take a look around any top 50 campus, you’ll find that this is not the case.  There are excellent athletes with poor GPAs, class presidents who can’t catch balloons, and virtuoso musicians with virtually no social skills.  The idea that colleges are looking for students who are OK at a bunch of things is literally ridiculous.  Colleges want students who are strong in one area.  They don’t want well-rounded students – they want well rounded classes.

This should come as no surprise once given some thought, and it should come as good news to nearly everyone.  The notable alumni on any college list are made up of people who are experts in their given fields.  There are notable physicists, newscasters, politicians, businessmen, etc.  No one is there because they made billions of dollars investing, and also because they play an excellent game of tennis.  So what’s the lesson to be learned from this?  And how can your child benefit from this information?

The key point is that you should try to magnify your child’s strengths.  Obviously, you cannot let weaknesses fall completely to the wayside.  If your child is an excellent writer but failing in math, letting him fail algebra so that he can work on his novel isn’t a realistic solution for getting into college.  But colleges are looking for excellence.  Instead of spending so much time catching their children up, parents might be wise to focus instead on getting them ahead.  Getting a B- in a subject is less impressive than getting an A-, but what is the sacrifice of boosting that grade?

It might just be your child’s chance of admissions success.  Consider two different applications: the first one features a young, cheery student with an A- average who happens to be the member of 4 different clubs, and is on the JV track team.  Certainly not a bad application, but no heads are being turned.  The second application features a student with a B average – However, they have A+s in all of their English and Literature courses, have won four of their schools writing awards, have had a poem published in The New Yorker and an article published in Time Out New York.  Who looks more impressive?  Who does it seem has a more clear path of success?  Who looks like they know what they want, and is willing and able to get it?  I’ll let you answer the question.

Recognize what your child loves and is talented at, and support them in their efforts.  From Einstein to Bill Gates, we constantly see examples of people who were sub-par at many things, yet still achieved world-renowned excellence.  There is literally no limit to what someone can achieve when they focus on their strengths.

Its that time of the year again. The data from last years Advanced Placement (AP) Tests are out and scores are on the rise. With 2008’s test only two months away, for those students who are looking at colleges and others who are waiting on acceptance letters, the realization begins to set in that there are many benefits to doing well on these exams in the coming months.

The good news for you, and especially you New Yorkers, is that you are 15% more likely to do well on this test than in any other state, according to an article in the New York Times. In fact for the second straight year, a score of 3 or higher on AP test scores are on the rise for all public schools in America at just over 15% of all students. Yet the number of poorly prepared students has grown steadily as well. Assuming the tests aren’t getting harder, it is apparent that our high schools are not preparing our students well enough. 

College Admissions offices use students AP Scores not only to gauge their knowledge, but also their work ethic and testing skills. For those entering college in the fall, a score of 4 or higher on the AP test could exempt them from many of the 300-person intro lectures of the freshman fall and spring semesters. This means that they will have more time to take the challenging and stimulating courses that are only offered in college, and also more bang for their parents $200,000 buck they will pay by the time they graduate. Being so important, it is no wonder that 18 of the top 25 best sellers on the CollegeBoard website are AP test prep books.

We live in a world in which marketing culture is ubiquitous.  I find it difficult to imagine what it means to be “the official tire of the NHL” or the “the official soup of the Oscars,” but there you have it.  One word that I automatically associate with this ever-present marketing is “guaranteed.”  It seems as if this word is thrown into so many marketing pitches, advertisements, infomercials, and even sandwich shop billboards that it has completely lost its meaning.  After having so many warrantees rejected, after seeing so many people’s “guaranteed” health insurance fail to cover their medical expenses, and after having the “the best sandwich of my life – guaranteed” taste like something from last week’s office party, I’ve lost faith in this word altogether.

                In some senses, the entire concept of a guarantee is humorous.  It seems a lot like a euphemism for; “there’s a realistic chance that you won’t be happy with our product, but in that case, we’ll give you your money back and you can pretend this never happened.”  Shouldn’t a real guarantee be implicit in a product?  Of course, not everyone is the same - some things that might work perfectly for one group of people will be a complete disaster for others.  Yet there is a basic principle that holds true across the spectrum: any responsible company should make sure that all of its clients are completely satisfied with their product before they try to sell it.

                It seems strange to mass market one’s guarantee.  A guarantee should be something that word-of-mouth takes care of for you.  If a close friend, family member, or coworker tells you that they’re happy with something they bought, and you’ve heard the same thing before, that’s a guarantee.  A company that leads national advertising campaigns based on its guarantee seems oddly like a complete stranger telling you: “trust me.”  It should be up to a company to instill confidence in its customers, not to simply give them a hollow promise

                All of this comes to mind when I think of this summer’s incident involving Sylvan’s failure to live up to its tutoring guarantee (to raise the GPA of its students at least one point over the course of 36 lessons.) The fact that court action was required here catches my attention for a number of reasons, the most important being this: if a company is guaranteeing to provide a service, and they don’t, there should be no court case – there should be a refund.  What could instill less confidence in a customer than to renege one’s own written guarantee?

                This is by no means meant to be an attack on Sylvan, Kaplan, or any other company that offers their services with a guarantee, but it does put certain things in perspective.  What might be the most despicable aspect of this case is Sylvan’s response to the allegations of incompetency: that they branch in question was franchised from them, and therefore not associated with them.  So a company that guarantees satisfaction has branches that are in no way connected to them?  Just a bit of food for thought.  It might be time that companies spend less time marketing their guarantee, and more time guaranteeing that their customers are satisfied.